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Vávrová, Daniela (2014) 'Skin has eyes and ears': audio- visual ethnography in a Sepik society. PhD thesis, James Cook University.

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Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’

Audio-visual Ethnography in a Sepik Society

by

Daniela VÁVROVÁ

Mag. Phil. University of Vienna, Austria, 2008

Thesis submitted to

The School of Arts and Social Sciences and The Cairns Institute

James Cook University

in fulfilment of the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

in the discipline of Social and Cultural Anthropology

January 2014

Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Statement of Authorship and Access

I, the undersigned, declare that this thesis is my own work and has not been submitted in any form for another degree or diploma at any university or other institution of tertiary education. Information derived from the published or unpublished work of others has been acknowledged in the text and the list of references is given. I also declare that as the copyright owner of this thesis, I grant James Cook University a permanent non-exclusive licence to store, display or copy any part, or all of the thesis, in all forms of media, for use within the University, and to make the thesis freely available online to other persons or organisations. I do not wish to place any restriction on access to this work.

Daniela Vávrová

16 May 2014

Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

For

Santa Maria the Explorer and Hector Downie

and the Pacific Ocean

Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It has been already more than fifteen years that my feet have not rested and my heart feels that to be at home is at home in the world. I left my native Slovakian country with the wish to travel and see this world full of different languages, cultures and environments. I felt that being from such a small country like Slovakia,

I needed to broaden my horizons and to learn about my own culture through experiencing other cultures. I have dedicated my life to learning, experimenting, creating, and the understanding of humanities.

My first gratitude goes to the Karawari-speaking Ambonwari people of East Sepik

Province in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Their passion and collaboration in my research made me a different person. I am most indebted to my widowed ‘sister’

Augustina and her children and grandchildren, the late Jack, Bapra, Glenda,

Pamela, Bradly, Nazeria, Elta, Lenon, Maia, Soroni, and Sanggrmari, who were my hosts while I was in the village. Their trust and friendship means a lot to me. I also have to mention and thank our ‘brothers’ Daniel and Lawrence, to the knowledgeable man Francis and teacher Julias, but also to James, Alexia,

Samson, Enet, and many others. All of them became my extended Papua New

Guinean family and friends. I was introduced to Ambonwari by the Slovene anthropologist Borut Telban, who has been returning to the village since his initial fieldwork in 1990. He was my inspiration for anthropology and the world of Papua

New Guinea. I would like to acknowledge his ongoing support. His companionship in the field was very important and his knowledge of the Karawari people continues

>Acknowledgements vii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

to inspire my work. The local Polish priest Piotrek Waśko became a friend too and a valuable partner in discussions we had during the nights of his visits to

Ambonwari. I was fortunate, with him, to see the surrounding areas of Ambonwari and to visit the villages in Amboin Parish.

It would not have been possible to carry out my work without the supervisory support of my principal supervisor Prof. Ton Otto, co-supervisor Prof. Alexandra Y.

Aikhenvald, associate advisor Dr. Michael Wood, external advisor Prof. David

MacDougall, and the assistance of research student monitor Dr. Nerina Caltabiano.

Ton Otto made me feel very welcome when I arrived as his first PhD student at

JCU in 2010 not long after Ton had taken up his position as tropical leader. We both were not new to the tropics, but we were new to the JCU system. In the tropics time runs slower than in the northern hemisphere and we both had to adjust to and learn to enjoy our new environment. We had an inspirational time and discussed extensively aspects of audio-visual research in PNG and my research in particular. There is a large PNG community in Cairns which made it an ideal and strategic place to live. We embarked, with Ton, on a longer co-operative journey exploring the visual in anthropology. My thesis would not be as it is without his passion and time invested. Michael Wood has become a valued discussant in many philosophical inquiries about anthropology and life. I am glad to have had him around and will not forget our coffee and cigarette brakes. Alexandra

Aikhenvald helped me many times with university infrastructural questions and gave me valuable linguistic advice for my thesis, which makes it interesting for linguists too. David MacDougall has inspired my work since the very beginning and has provided very valuable filmic advice and challenges to my writings.

>Acknowledgements viii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

My research would not have been possible without the financial support of James

Cook University (JCU) in Australia, School of Arts and Social Sciences and The

Cairns Institute in particular. I was awarded an International Postgraduate

Research Scholarship and a Research Tuition Scholarship. JCU also covered additional expenses I had such as, for example, necessary antimalarial tablets for an entire year of my fieldwork. Among other important institutions that helped me to realise my research project are: the National Research Institute of PNG which gave me the necessary affiliation and permission to carry out my project; and the

Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research which also covered some of the expenses in the field and enabled me to secure some additional audio equipment. I would also like to thank the Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies,

Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts for the audio-visual equipment, which I have used in the field since 2007. Gary Gulliford, manager of video-conferencing and audiovisual services at JCU in Cairns helped me with technical preparation for the field. I deeply thank him for all his time and effort, which ensured my fieldwork had almost no technical trouble. I also want to mention Dr. Linus S. Digim’Rina, anthropologist at the University of Papua New

Guinea for his help and hospitality whenever I was in Port Moresby. There are also a few individuals who contributed financially and spiritually to my fieldwork, my

European friends and relatives, Maria Leutzendorff, Danica Telban, Karol Školnik,

Petra Bosá, Allison Jablonko, and of course my mother Mária Vávrová, Stanislav

Vávra, and my sister Marta Garajová with her family.

I also want to thank one of the greatest ethnographic filmmakers, Gary Kildea for his advice and his passion for filmmaking and flying that we share together; to

Darja Hoenigman and her advice on language and subtitling in my thesis’ film as

>Acknowledgements ix Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

well as our friendship and shared interest in PNG culture; and Prof. Kim Usher from the School of Nursing, Midwifery and Nutrition at JCU who has supported my research since the beginning of my studies in 2010. I also had the opportunity to cooperate in her projects. I cannot forget to thank Elena Rhind, who looked after the first postgraduate research students at The Cairns Institute, and Dominique

Sandilant at the School of Arts and Social Sciences for her help and assistance in managing my finances. And I cannot forget to thank the friends and academics at

The Australian National University. I was able to work on my thesis’ material and present some of my audio-visual work in January and February 2013 when I was affiliated as a Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, and their Digital Humanities Hub. Among a few I want to mention are Chris Ballard and Mem Wilson, Michael W. Young and Elizabeth Brouwer, Pip Deveson, Melinda

Hinkson, and Judith MacDougall. Ultimately, my written thesis was improved by the editorial services of The Expert Editor (Brendan Brown).

My last, but not least gratitude, goes to my friends and colleagues at JCU. Many of them successfully graduated and are leading their contemporary projects; Peter

Wood, Lisa King, Dawn Glass and Bård Aaberge. Also my PNG friends: Titus

Kakul, Grace Guaigu, Gabriel Porolak, Janet Gagul, and Mary Hikimet. There is one more special thank you to be expressed and that is to a small beach place called Yorkeys Knob and a few residents who became my friends. I settled there at the beginning of my studies and its shores were the main source for my inspiration.

Walking the beach at sunrise was the stimulation to make this thesis happen. For the first time I felt like I had found a place in a paradise.

>Acknowledgements x Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’

Audio-visual Ethnography in a Sepik Society

ABSTRACT

My PhD thesis is based on several visits and a year of fieldwork in Ambonwari village of East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. It deploys audio-visual methods to explore how people shape, and are shaped by, their social and cultural environment through their sensory experience. I focus on the visible arɨm ‘skin, body’ and the invisible wambung ‘insideness, understanding’, as the main sources of people’s experience. My aim was not simply to explore these Ambonwari understandings of experience but to follow insights derived from Maurice Merleau-

Ponty and David MacDougall, among others, in order to understand the reciprocal function of these sensory engagements as ways of knowledge. I chose to have the camera as a mediator in my research and a catalyst for an ‘exchange of vision’ between myself and the Ambonwari. I discuss the possibility of seeing the invisible by changing one’s skin and I take my audio-visual material, Ambonwari recordings, and our public film screenings to explore this concept. Both, in the text and in the audio-visual material, I highlight how Ambonwari concepts of ‘skin’ and

‘insideness’, and the seen and the invisible, structured their experience of film viewing and filmmaking. In doing this I outline an approach to visual ethnography that stresses the sensual properties of the Ambonwari visual experience.

xi Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

xii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii Abstract xi List of Audiovisual Material xvii List of Plates xx List of Appendices, Maps, Tables and Figures xxii Note on Language, Translations and Subtitling xxiii

INTRODUCTION: Situating the Audio-visual Research 01 The Ambonwari Island 04 Researching Perceptions 15 Becoming Attuned to the Senses 21 Seeing and Hearing in Papua New Guinea and Beyond 28 Perception of the Ethnographer 35 Outline of Parts and Chapters 38

PART I: Camera-Eye 43

CHAPTER One: Camera in the Field 48 The Use of the Camera in Visual Anthropology 48 Ways of Engaging With the World 56 Camera as Catalyst 64 The Filmed Subject 1 71 The Filmed ‘Truth’ 74

CHAPTER Two: Cameraperson 78 From Extension to Being 78 I is Another 89 The Filmed Subject 2 93 Camera in the Hands of the Ambonwari 97

xiii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

PART II: World of Perceptions and Expressions 109

CHAPTER Three: The Senses 116 Skin or Body? 116 Removing, Changing, and Covering the Skin 121 When Shame and Sickness Climb on the Skin 127 Eyes and Ears 134 The Problems of not Seeing in the Dark and Seeing the Spirits 137 Hidden Things of the Past and the Visions of the Charismatics 143 Seeing and Understanding 147 Wambung 148 Wambung and Socio-Cultural Change 151 When Wambung Dies 157

CHAPTER Four: Ethnography of Communication 167 Face and Body in Image and Talk 167 Signs and Sounds 177 Communication with God 177 Communication with the Dead Children and Bush Spirits 180 Visual and Aural Signs 183 Visible and Invisible 188

PART III: Ambonwari-Eye 195

CHAPTER Five: Cinema in the Bush 201 A Brief History of the Cinema in Papua New Guinea 201 From Private Screenings to Public Cinema in Ambonwari 209 Watching Avatar 214 The Last Bible and the Magic of Red Balloon 219

CHAPTER Six: Seeing Oneself 226 The World of Black and White 226 Watching PNG Productions 233 Social Aspects of Collaborative Production 237 Seeing Oneself 241

xiv Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

CONCLUSION: Towards New Horizons 247

Bibliography 259 Filmography 284 Appendices 289

xv Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

xvi Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

List of Audio-visual Material

All the material is on the accompanied DVD as well as on the internet under the links listed below. The videos are in mp4 format and may not be watched in Firefox Mozilla browser. If using an Apple computer, please open them with Safari browser and in the case of watching the videos on a PC, use Internet Explorer.

Film:

‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’ 42 Audio-visual Ethnography in a Sepik Society 83:22 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > https://www.dropbox.com/s/ezxv9rkpqlk49f7/SkinHasEyesAndEars%20SUBTFINAL_h264_3000Kbps_720p.mp4

Video-clips incorporated into the text:

Camera as Catalyst 77 15:52 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=173

Dialogic Recording with the Ambonwari 95 29:45 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=175

Ambonwari Recordings 01 100, 237 15:07 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=176

xvii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Ambonwari Recordings 02 101, 237 27:34 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=177

Waykakrarin (Rubbing of a hot leaf on baby-girl’s skin) 126 11:03 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=172

Kay Wurukrarin ’Rocking Canoe’ 146, 182 14:28 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=178

Terrence Trilogy Part 01 160, 161 16:44 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=179

Terrence Trilogy Part 02 163 08:04 minutes > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=180

Terrence Trilogy Part 03 163 18:09 minutes, Tok Pisin and Karawari Language, English subtitles > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=181

Jeffrey & Abel 01 233 04:08 minutes > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=182

Jeffrey & Abel 02 233 03:49 minutes > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=183

Jeffrey & Abel 03 233 02:20 minutes > http://rachel.reflectangulo.net/?artid=184

xviii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Slideshows:

Slideshow 01: Jeffrey’s photographic art > 105 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6n27rfs1nfw0qvj/NAZ-YQ3OO0/resources/images/large

Slideshow 02 (incl. MP3 audio): Fishing with Augustina Awsay > 138 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eg5cx4vaw49azfp/mg1hbcj1r3 Download the audio, then follow resources, images > https://www.dropbox.com/sh/eg5cx4vaw49azfp/j8zOVxjkOd/resources/images/large

Slideshow 03 (incl. MP3 audio): Kurang for Terrence > 163 https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jqte4ndgntmyb7g/ldGLnZrkYy Download the audio, then follow resources, images > https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jqte4ndgntmyb7g/1tSI2RxEfc/resources/images/large

xix Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

List of Plates

All the plates were made by Daniela Vávrová if not indicated otherwise.

Plate 1: Panapɨnɨng is a fruit of the panap tree. The fruit is as big as a pumpkin. One eats the bright orange pulp which is quite dry. The seeds are as large as the chestnuts. Diary nr. 3. 01 Plates 2 and 3: Panapɨnɨng and Bradly enjoying it as much as I did. 05 Plate 4: The founders of Ambonwari village © Jeffrey Donald 2011 08 Plate 5: Daniel Akwi, my ‘brother’. 43 Plate 6: Krmaim holding the horizontal sago leaves over the roof. 80 Plate 7: Sanggwanda, my Sony HDV camcorder when ‘sick’. 92 Plate 8: The frog, yarakmay, with no bump but only bones, the skinny one. 92 Plate 9: Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). 92 Plate 10: Enet Yapai and her ‘father’, brother’s son. 96 Plate 11: Jeffrey with his mobile phone, Ambonwari village. 102 Plate 12: Jeffrey Donald Captain. 106 Plate 13: Martina Sanggrinja in a camp. 109 Plate 14: Sapɨn / Mambi © Dominic Bob 2011 122 Plate 15: Eagle-man in a dream © Napoleon Sangri 2011 125 Plate 16: Augustina with Bapra’s son Bradly. 130 Plate 17: The national Post-Courier announcing the boat collision. 158 Plate 18: Listening to the ‘other side’ and arranging the arrival of the corpse. 160 Plate 19: Popular Xcess wireless phone distributed by Telikom PNG. 161 Plate 20: Wunduma © Dominic Bob 2011 169 Plate 21, from left: Sambɨs kamapian 'big open eyes', yipɨmbas kambɨnɨnggi 'big heavy thick lips', kwandɨkas yarakɨsan 'ears like mushrooms', anduk kamandiakɨkɨn 'wide open mouth' © Pressley Julias 2011 174 Plate 22, from left: blocked nose, hanging lips, blocked ears © Pressley Julias 2011 176

xx Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Plate 23: Pentecostal Sunday. 179 Plate 24: Maggie collapsed in front of St. Steven church in Ambonwari. 180 Plate 35: Mambɨr at Maramun Creek prohibiting people to park their canoes at this place. 186 Plate 36: Mambɨr on a coconut palm prohibiting people to climb and take coconuts. 187 Plate 37: Drawing of Yambonman men’s house in which secret spirit-crocodiles, flutes, slit-drums, and carved posts were hidden from women and children © Jeffrey Donald 2011 190 Plate 38: Jeffrey Donald with a book of inventions. 195 Plate 39: A photographic collage presented for my confirmation seminar at James Cook University on 27 July 2010. 204 Plate 40: Screening the footage from 2007-2008 in Crocodile-1 Clan area. 211 Plate 41: Screening The Book of Eli. 212 Plate 42: The story-board Avatar © Bapra Simi 2011 215 Plate 43: Drawing of The Book of Eli © Pierson Greg 2011 221 Plate 44: Drawing of The Red Balloon © Pierson Greg 2011 223 Plate 45: Autoportrait © Soroni Simi 2011 238 Plate 46: Augustina Awsay watching her family story. 239 Plate 47: A Struggle for Horizon with a quote from Merleau-Ponty (1964). Diary nr. 5. 258

xxi Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

List of Appendices, Maps, Tables, & Figures

Appendices:

Appendix 1: Audio-visual Equipment 289 Appendix 2: Body with the Karawari terms for particular body parts 292 Appendix 3: Local terms for foreign objects 298 Appendix 4: Table with Facial Expressions 303 Appendix 5: Signs & Sounds 319 Appendix 6: Mambɨr according to clans 325

Maps:

Map 1: The ‘island’ of Ambonwari 07 Map 2: Lower Sepik Area 09 Map 3: Amboin Parish 10 Map 4: Ambonwari village in 2011 11 Map 5: From Ambonwari to Mɨmɨkɨnma © Bapra Simi 2011 14

Tables:

Table 1: Growth of the Ambonwari population 13 Table 2: Positive and Negative Camera-Catalysts 68

Figures:

Figure 1: aki and yimari relationship 86

xxii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Note on Language, Translations, & Subtitling

The Karawari language belongs to the Lower Sepik Family of Papuan or so called non-Austronesian group of languages. The Karawari-speakers are members of eight main villages in East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea: Konmei, Manjamai, Kundiman, Meikrobi, Kaiwaria, Kungriambun, Masandenai, and Ambonwari (see Map 3). Their neighbouring language groups are Iatmul, Biwat, Arafundi, Yimas, Alamblak (Telban 1998: 16). Ambonwari also speak Tok Pisin, the lingua franca of Papua New Guinea. The audio-visual material was recorded in both Karawari and Tok Pisin. Translations from the local language into Tok Pisin were done with the help of the village teacher Julias Sunggulmari and Borut Telban. Consequently I did translations into English in Australia. In my thesis I follow Karawari orthography as outlined in Telban (1998: xvii). Like Yimas (Foley 1991: 44) Karawari also presents a system of four vowels, /a/, /ɨ/, /i/, and /u/, of which /a/ and /ɨ/ are the most common. The /ɨ/ phoneme, which is a mid-central vowel, and usually heard as /i/ in ‘sir’, can be sometimes heard also as /i/ or /u/ and in such cases it is not easy to distinguish between them. I use /ng/ to indicate a nasal /ŋ/ with /g/ inaudible. When /g/ in /ng/ combination is heard I write it as /ngg/.

The languages spoken in the film ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’ and the audio-visual clips accompanying my thesis are Karawari, Tok Pisin, and English. One can observe generational differences in the use of these languages by children, young people, and adults. I follow a standard subtitling into English with several exceptions. Sometimes I deliberately use the Karawari terms for different plants and animals and provide their literal translation. As many of them have not been identified there is no English translation ready for them. My intention, however, was to mediate the sense of place as talked about and lived by the people and experienced by an ethnographer. I wanted to show the playful use of different languages in everyday life and the limitations we are faced with when engaging with the worlds of other people and consequently with our translations. In this way, I emphasised the advantages and disadvantages of media we employ in our research. Throughout my fieldwork the audio-visual communication through films became a fruitful way for sensory exchange between the people and their audio- visual ethnographer.

xxiii Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

INTRODUCTION:

Situating the Audio-visual Research

Plate 1: Panapɨnɨng is a fruit of panap tree. The fruit is as big as pumpkin. One eats the bright orange pulp which is quite dry. The seeds are as large as chestnuts. Diary nr. 3 © Daniela Vávrová 2011

> Introduction 1 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

This study is the result of my long-term preoccupation with using the camera, making still and moving images, and thinking about vision generally. It is also the outcome of my first visit to Ambonwari in 2005, which led to a prolonged stay in 2007 and 2008 and consequently to a year-long stint of fieldwork in this Karawari-speaking village, in

East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG). In my thesis I engage in a discussion about seeing and hearing, external skin and interior body, touch and understanding, and visible and invisible domains, all of which combine to create a sensory framework for the Ambonwari people among whom I lived and worked between December 2010 and December 2011. I argue that seeing and hearing are the central sensory modalities, not only in Ambonwari social interactions, but also in people’s sensual engagement with the world. In its generality this argument may be applicable to all people and cultures, but there is a particular emphasis on visible and invisible realms in Ambonwari perceptions of the world. For them, one gains access to the invisible by exchanging external skins and therefore perspectives. One becomes able to see through the eyes of others.

I have used audio-visual research methods to elicit these engagements and to initiate a dialogue about pictorial representation. I call my work an audio-visual ethnography, which expands the anthropological inquiry into socio-cultural specificities by incorporating photo and film technology into the research. I found this combination challenging with regard to the final outcome where text and audio-visual material are intended to interact with each other. Consequently, I created a text which incorporates many photographs, drawings, videos and slideshows. I also edited a longer film

> Introduction 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

accompanying the thesis so as to evoke my sensory experience of the Ambonwari world.1

Throughout my research I tried to understand and be guided by the Ambonwari saying arɨm sambɨs ngandɨkɨm kwandɨkas ngandɨkɨm ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’. It means that a person observes and perceives the surroundings by seeing and hearing embedded in the person’s ‘flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968). This engagement does not only concern the places where people walk and paddle, fish and hunt every day, but also the places that appear in people’s dreams and visions. Audio-visual technology equally engages the viewer through seeing and hearing. One gains access to other worlds via image and sound and their relation to one’s memory and embodied practices. There is a reversible and reciprocal relation between the film’s and viewer’s skin and the world

(Barker 2009, Marks 2000, Sobchack 1992). Thus, how we see, perceive, and interpret a film, is framed in accordance with our lived experiences, sensuality, knowledge, and ultimately social and cultural background. Through my and Ambonwari recording and watching films together, I initiated a dialogue about pictorial representation of the seen and unseen and their connection with the Ambonwari contemporary and customary practices. Ultimately, I have arrived at an ‘exchange of vision’, something akin to what Viveiros de Castro (2012) and Marilyn Strathern (2013) have called an ‘exchange of perspectives’.

1 All the audio-visual material is on the enclosed DVD as well as on the internet. The short videos are linked to my personal website http://rachel.reflectangulo.net, the slide-shows and the film ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’ are in my internet Dropbox folder. See the ‘List of Audio-visual Material’ with the appropriate links.

> Introduction 3 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

In my view, the Ambonwari adage ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’ involves the idea that one engages with the world through one’s skin which is the locus of sensory experience.

This engagement is relevant not only to one’s everyday life but also, as I discuss in the thesis, when recording with a camera and watching a film. In a single day one looks at many things and people, observes flora and fauna, listens to many voices and hears noises. One moves through several places, touches a large number of objects, smells different odors, and tries to make sense of them all. Moreover, one remembers certain places, people, and things that looked, sounded, felt, and smelled similar to those one has just encountered. One also forgets or leaves dormant in the body millions of past sensory inputs. Every single day is a day of perceptions of the world one inhabits, but also the world one creates and imagines on the basis of these perceptions. As

Merleau-Ponty said, “perception is initiation into the world“ (1998 [1962]: 257). One cannot escape nor ignore it. One lives it.

The Ambonwari Island

When I arrived in Ambonwari during Christmas 2010, I was given panapɨnɨng to eat. It was the most peculiar fruit I have ever eaten in my life. I loved it from the first bite.2 Its skin is very rough and its edible pulp has barely any taste. For many villagers it was too dry to eat. It was also regarded as being unsuitable for a proper meal. However, I

2 Panapɨnɨng is a fruit of Parartocarpus venonosa (family Moraceae). When the skin of the fruit dries up and looks like a mixture of dark grey, brown, and green colour, then the pulp of this kind of breadfruit is eaten raw.

> Introduction 4 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

was fascinated by the crooked shape of the fruit and the bright orange colour of the pulp.

Plates 2 and 3: Panapɨnɨng and Bradly enjoying it as much as I did © Daniela Vávrová 2011

The panap tree is very tall and people do not climb it. They wait until the fruit falls down. Once I learned about it, I waited every morning for the sound of falling panapɨnɨng to get it as the first food of the day together with the sago pancake. It always made a happy beginning of the day. After a modest breakfast, we, the women of the house, usually embarked with canoes on a trip to check the fishing nets and hooks, and now and then to process sago.

Panapɨnɨng is a seasonal fruit that usually grows in the dry season. This is the time when the canoes are parked on the dry ground of Maramun and Ibris Creeks and the dusty ground is cracked, and thirsty for the rain. People often get sick during the dry season, saying that it is malaria, which gets hold of them because of the strong sunshine. It is hard to bathe as the water is too shallow and muddy, and one has to

> Introduction 5 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

walk about a kilometre to get to the junction of two bigger streams. On the one hand, during the dry season, it is easy to walk through the forest, which provides excellent shade. People make fires and cook food in the gardens, sheds, or just off the walking paths. On the other hand, it is hard to carry heavy things around and bring them to the village. People do not even try to bring tree trunks for posts and canoes to the village when the creeks lack sufficient water. Probably the hardest of all things is to bring necessary sago flour, the staple food, which each family has to process in the distant sago forests at least once every two weeks. Many creeks dry up and many water passages, which are used in the rainy season, become impassable. The leaves of the rubber trees change their colours during the dry season like the trees in Europe during the autumn. People do not tap the rubber trees during this time, but wait for the new green leaves to appear on the branches. The dry season is a time of cooler breezes.

The morning mist and the falling leaves make a difference in the greenness of the forest. Sago grubs are a delicacy of the dry season while large grubs, grasshoppers and wild greens are collected throughout the year. The dry season means hard work in contrast to the wet season when everything flowers, when there is a plentitude of fish, and canoes can be paddled on the little streams straight into the heart of the sago forest. Upon their return to the village, in the wet season, people moor their canoes close to their houses. The men hunt wild pigs, cassowaries, possums, bandicoots and birds. It is also the time for the collective hunting of wild pigs through the burning of grassland. The fire chases the wild pigs out of the grass, away from the forest, and towards the waters. The hunters follow the fire and chase the running pigs. When the

> Introduction 6 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

heavy rain falls the water rapidly fluctuates and many places become flooded. The village of Ambonwari becomes an island surrounded by the waters (Map 1).

Map 1: The ‘island’ of Ambonwari

The main vehicle used in the area is the kay ‘canoe’. The word kay, however, also refers to one of the main Ambonwari concepts which can be glossed as ‘manner, habit, the way of doing things, being and life generally’ (for an extensive discussion of the concept of kay see Telban 1998). Although it may be coincidental that the same term is used both for canoe and for the way of doing things, it nevertheless appears to fit well for people who spent most of their time on rivers and creeks. People talk, for example, about kupambɨn kay, ‘the way of the ancestors’ or immɨnggan kay, ‘the way

> Introduction 7 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

of the village’. A Kay ‘canoe’ is also used to bury a deceased person. The Karawari- speaking Ambonwari of the East Sepik Province are water people. They perceive themselves in these terms in contrast to the Arafundi-speaking Imanmeri who live on the nearby hills. Ambonwari call them kambo ‘the mountain people’. The Ambonwari myths of origin are connected to different ancestors travelling on the rivers before joining together into a society of multiple clans.

Plate 4: The founders of Ambonwari village © Jeffrey Donald 2011

Ambonwari village is situated between twelve and sixteen hours by motor-canoe away from Angoram. The travel time depends on the power of an outboard motor, load in the canoe, and the access to the shortcuts between Karawari and Sepik Rivers (see Map

> Introduction 8 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

2). Karawari-speaking people live in eight villages around the Karawari River,

Kanggramai Creek and Konmei Creek in the Lower Sepik Area of the East Sepik

Province in Papua New Guinea.

Map 2: Lower Sepik Area

These villages are: Masandanai, Manjamai, Kungriambun, Kaiwaria, Meikerobi,

Kundiman, Konmei, and Ambonwari. Together with other language groups of Imanmeri and Kanjimei villages on Konmei Creek, two Yimas villages, and Wambramas, Awim,

Yamandim and Imboin on Arafundi River, Karawari belongs to the Amboin Parish of the Catholic Church. The only exception is the village of Masandanai which belongs to the Seventh-day Adventist Church (SDA) (see Map 3).

> Introduction 9 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Map 3: Amboin Parish

Being situated on an island, one can paddle all around Ambonwari. The ninety houses composing the village are lined up along the Ibris and Maramun Creeks. Each house has its own shore where the household members moor their canoes, wash dishes and clothes, and bath. Water for drinking is fetched from a small creek called Yuwambakɨs pandang ‘Turtle’s spring’. Those few who have corrugated roofing sheets – although no houses are covered by them – use them to collect rainwater. The coconut palms and rubber trees in and around the village were planted by the Ambonwari ancestors.

They also mark the borders between the lands of different individuals, lineages and clans.

> Introduction 10 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Map 4: Ambonwari village in 2011

There are twelve totemic clans in the village (see Map 4; the few members of the Eel

Clan do not have their own houses but live together with the members of the

Cassowary Clan). The village is divided into three main areas, separated by ditches and connected by fallen tree trunks as bridges. This tripartite division of the village follows Ambonwari myths of origin and the arrival of the first ancestors to the area. The youngest brother Kapi (representing the collective identity of the Crocodile-1 Clan) was the first to arrive. He was followed by his eldest brother Akumbrikupan (Bird of

Paradise Clan). Their middle brother Mamanggamai (Crocodile-2) was the last to join

> Introduction 11 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

them.3 Their other brother Kwarisa did not enter Konmei Creek at all, but found a new place, today known as Manjamai. The men from Manjamai regularly paddled upriver to catch fish on Konmei Creek. Some of them decided to stay in their camps for good.

That is how Konmei village came into being. The ancestors of other Ambonwari clans became – either through marriage or through adoption – slowly attached to the village and were given the land to live on (Telban 1998: 68-80, 142-161).

Ambonwari village has grown significantly over the last twenty years (see Table 1).

The number of people and the number of houses have almost doubled in this period, and, in addition, there are many more absentees living temporarily or permanently in towns. Because of better health services and easier transport to the hospital many more children survive into older age. An average family has between six to eight children (Vávrová 2008). The census of 2011 shows that the population in Ambonwari was 784 people. Not all of these people, however, live in the village. In recent years many of them left in search of work and education, to Lae, Vanimo or Madang. Of those living in the village, women (153) outnumber men (122). This is due to the fact that it is mainly men, and rarely women or whole families, who leave to live in towns.

There are only four women from elsewhere who married Ambonwari men and moved to the village. The majority of the villagers are children and minors up to 18 years of age (406). The number of people and the number of houses have almost doubled, but the space on which the village is situated did not grow much. The older people used to

3 For Ambonwari myths of origin, social organization, and kinship see Telban (1998).

> Introduction 12 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

tell me how crowded the village had become and the young people were enthusiastically comparing the village to a PNG town.

Table 1: Growth of the Ambonwari population4

Men Women Children Absent TOTAL Houses

(above 18) (above 18) (under 18)

1954 25 51 96 15 187

13.5% 27% 51.5% 8%

1990 107 75 215 25 422 57

25% 18% 51% 6%

2005 91 112 358 63 624 61

15% 18% 57% 10%

2007 99 129 411 111 750 80

13% 17% 55% 15%

2011 122 153 406 103 784 90

15% 20% 52% 13%

4 Data for 1954 and 1990 are based on censuses conducted by Copley (1954: 54-55) and Telban (1998: 78-79) respectively. In February 2005, December 2007, and April 2011, Borut Telban and I collected all census data together.

> Introduction 13 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

One way of capturing the audio-visual and spatial divisions between upriver (east) and downriver (west) directions, distances and sizes, surroundings, colours and textures, noises and voices, is to look at the images themselves. Map 5, drawn by Bapra Simi, shows on the left side the path from the village to Yamaymar known for its fishing spots and on the right side Mɨmɨkɨnma camp, owned by Bapra’s mother’s brothers.

The people go there to cut the wild sago palms and collect the sago grubs.

Map 5: From Ambonwari to Mɨmɨkɨnma © Bapra Simi 2011

Like Bapra’s map, other drawings, photographs, and videos made by Ambonwari presented in my work are pictorial representations of the Ambonwari environment,

> Introduction 14 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

myths of origin, spirits, and relationships, reflecting people’s engagement with my audio-visual ethnographic research. Bapra’s drawing of the village, fishing place, and camp in the sago forest looks more like a study than a simple map. She does not emphasise the distances between the places, as we are used to in a map, but fills up the squares showing significant things of the places and the particular people who go there. She highlights differences in the structure but also the texture of the places.

Bapra as well as other Ambonwari, remember the paths they walk and the rivers they paddle on by significant markers such as camp houses, gardens, grasslands, bushes, trees, tree trunk bridges, streams in the forest, and also traps, fishing nets, and hooks in the waters. Some of these also indicate the land borders of the Ambonwari clans and lineages with other villages in the area. People know precisely whose land is where. In the film accompanying my thesis, ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’, the viewer can listen to people while walking with them through the forest or paddling on the creek.

One can see the sago flour, greens, and fish, and how they are processed, gathered or caught. With both mediums, written and audio-visual, I try to convey the thoughts and feelings of living in the world of constant movement between forest and waters, visible and invisible, birth and decay, and between the world within the community and the one outside.

Researching Perceptions

My ethnographic material is almost exclusively based on audio-visual recordings supported by additional audio recordings and written field notes. By giving precedence to audio-visual methods in my research, I wanted to emphasize the multisensory

> Introduction 15 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

quality of perception and experience (Pink 2009). This quality showed up clearly when viewing and making images as well as looking at social and cultural particularities of vision structured by the visible and invisible aspects of the world. During my first visit to

Ambonwari in 2005, the people got familiar with my camera and recordings. In 2007-

2008 I returned there to conduct a short-term fieldwork of four months as a part of my

M.A. studies. I was already focused on visual anthropology and planned to involve

Ambonwari people in my recordings whenever I would return to the village. In 2010, I departed for a year-long fieldwork as a part of my PhD studies. I brought not only my own audio-visual equipment, but also three small cameras to be used by the people in the village. I also brought sheets of stout paper for drawings and making collages, as well as paint and pencils. I planned to use different arts-informed approaches because of their visual specificities, approaches, and the sensory responses they engender

(Butler-Kisber 2010: 8, 104). Photographs, video recordings, collages and drawings made by Ambonwari are responses to my questions. These responses are of a different form but nevertheless parallel to the answers in recorded interviews.

Ambonwari understood these methods as an exchange and creation of relationships with the distant world represented by both my presence and my questioning. We also collectively watched different recordings and movies, and subsequently discussed them.

The so-called photo-elicitation is a well-known research method (Banks 2001, Collier and Collier 1986 [1967], Rose 2007). Photographs used in the research, as Gillian

Rose writes, “can carry or evoke three things – information, affect and reflection –

> Introduction 16 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

particularly well” (2007: 238). They are also precise records of material reality (Collier and Collier 1986 [1967]: 5). Chris Wright, who used photographs in his research in the

Western Solomons, writes that “the introduction of photography does not mark the radical irruption of a shockingly new or modern way of seeing, but a recognizable vehicle for the maintenance of connections with ancestors. Historically, the photograph is only one more object in a long line of media, that have the status of relic and the capacity to achieve a presence” (2004: 78). In the literature on research methods, film- elicitation has not been discussed to the same extent and depth as was the case with photographs. This is mainly because of the technical demands pertaining to recording and viewing in the field. Films were rarely watched in the field whereas photographs could be easily handled. Nonetheless, as I will discuss later in this thesis, there have been several attempts at film-elicitation that have served for further recording in the field and created more reflexive audio-visual accounts (Barbash and Taylor 1997,

Hockings 2003 [1974], Gaines and Renov 1999, Otto 2013). In my research, recording and watching the recorded images were interrelated from the start. This stimulated further creation and often also intense discussions. Together with Ambonwari, I tried to respond to the world’s obsession with the images and touch upon the following questions: What do people see in an image? How does it relate to people’s perception of the world and their lived experience? How does cultural background influence people’s perception of the contrast between the visible and invisible? And finally, what are the tools for communicating what and how people see? Through these questions, visual and auditory answers, and discussions that followed, I came closer to

> Introduction 17 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

understanding the world of Ambonwari according to their concepts of arɨm ‘skin’, wambung ‘insideness, understanding’, and the kay ‘way of doing things’.

One can always argue that not everything can be recorded by audio-visual means and that many things cannot be perceived through the screen the way they can be written.

One of the Ambonwari men was repeatedly telling me that he must see things with his own eyes to confirm their existence and relevance. In his view, and in the view of many Ambonwari people, knowing only by hearing can be misleading. In such a case they would say that invisible wambung ‘insideness’ has tricked them through kambra mariawk, ‘just talking, nonsense, or lies’. The title of my thesis, ‘Skin has Eyes and

Ears’, suggests the approach taken to these issues and indicates the emphasis on the two sensory modalities. Hence, I chose the camera to be a mediator in my research for its primary ability to see and hear. It became a catalyst that stimulated things to happen, a tool for engagement with the Ambonwari and the distant world. My approach and the recordings I made differ from a classical research footage, which primarily documents everyday practices and rituals occurring in different remote villages of Papua New Guinea. The Institute for Scientific Film in Germany has been active in this field and has produced a considerable number of short films on the Sepik area.5 The major difference with this material is my use of audio-visual methods and

5 The ‘Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film – Göttingen (IWF)’ was closed in 2010. The videos were relocated to the Technical Information Library in Hannover and many are not yet available to researchers and the public for legal and technical reasons (for more information visit: www.tib-hannover.de). See Medienkatalog, Ethnologie Australien/Ozeanien (1997: 75- 100) for an overview of films produced in the Sepik area.

> Introduction 18 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

analytical concept of the ‘camera as a catalyst’. I gave cameras to the people to record their own audio-visual material. This was then used for analysis and reflection. I did not want to limit these recordings to being merely illustrative accompaniments to text- based research, but primarily intended to see how such methods, in their own right produce other forms of knowledge. Recording on their own, Ambonwari felt that they could approach the audience directly without an ethnographer’s mediation that is characteristic of written work.

Eventually the camera, which I handled, received a name, and became a being on its own with anggɨndarkwa ‘spirit’, arɨm ‘skin’ and wambung ‘understanding’. It got ‘sick’ and wanted to be ‘healed’. It was able to capture the spirits in the forest as well as the most respected, worshipped, and feared spirit of the village, whom the women were supposed neither to see nor to mention. This situation brought me to the core of my research questions as it involved issues of the visible which often cannot be seen by everyone (because of gender) and the invisible which can be seen or made visible only by some (by spirits, for example). In my writings, I discuss the possibility of the disclosure of one’s thoughts and actions through the camera. The foreign films watched by the village audience became elicitors of people’s thoughts and feelings but primarily elicited their ideas about the unseen distant world. On the other hand, when watching the recordings made in the village – of villagers, their already dead relatives, and their close surroundings – Ambonwari engaged with their own world reflecting upon the past, present, and future. In this relation between visible and invisible, outside and inside, arɨm ‘skin’ and wambung ‘insideness, understanding’, I tackle the

> Introduction 19 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

subjects of sensory experiences and present them in their interdependency. The audio-visual methods thus bring these two sides of the Ambonwari approach together and help express the Ambonwari’s lived experience of the audio-visual in its verisimilitude.6

In order to link my writings with the audio-visual material and to understand the

Ambonwari perception of images, I needed to understand their perception of themselves and the environment at large (see Part II). Three issues were constantly reappearing during this exploration: first, the spirits (of different beings including humans, spirits of the dead, bush spirits) can change their ‘skins’. They can see the world from different perspectives. In other words, this corporeal diversity of a single spirit allows a person to see the world through many eyes (see Viveiros de Castro

2012: 46). Second, the skin with its senses, seeing and hearing in particular, influences wambung with its feelings, thoughts, and memory, and vice versa. One could say that arɨm ‘skin’ and wambung ‘insideness’ are in continuous communication.

Third, the invisible world is for Ambonwari as real as the visible one. As neither I nor my camera had direct access to this invisible world through our immediate senses

(with certain exceptions mentioned in the thesis), a different medium was needed – writing, drawing, and narrative – to present and explain it to myself and the reader.

Ultimately, I created a combination of several audio-visual formats relating to each other, encompassing several levels and views of my and Ambonwari experience and perception of the world.

6 See Appendix 1: Audio-visual Equipment, used during my fieldwork.

> Introduction 20 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Becoming Attuned to the Senses

In her book Doing Sensory Ethnography, Sarah Pink (2009) addresses the question of how we can share knowledge about visual and sensory practice. She advocates applied research that links with academic work and speaks in favour of interdisciplinary research (anthropology, art and history, for example). Building on early ethnographic studies, she states that the “sensory ethnographer is trying to access areas of embodied, emplaced knowing and to use these as a basis from which to understand human perception, experience, action and meaning and to situate this culturally and biographically” (Pink 2009: 47). Pink’s words could be compared to those of David

MacDougall about ‘social aesthetic’ (in Greek aesthesis originally meant ‘sense experience’). He refers to aesthetics not in the Kantian sense of the theorizing about what constitutes beauty, but as concrete elements such as the design of buildings and grounds, the use of clothing and colours, and the particular style of speech and gestures. For him aesthetics is a field “composed of objects and actions, in some respects the physical manifestation of the largely internalized and invisible ‘embodied history’ that Bourdieu calls habitus” (David MacDougall 2006: 98; in the Ambonwari case we could talk of the kay ‘way of doing things’, see Telban 1998). In my thesis’ film

‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’, the viewer can see this emplaced knowing and Ambonwari aesthetics in people’s ways of fishing, hunting, walking through the forest, processing sago, paddling the canoes, or in their style of speech and gestures. The film utilizes aesthetics that is always carrying a particular cultural, social, and biographical significance.

> Introduction 21 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Other anthropologists who have discussed the social and cultural significance of perceptions of the world, include Tim Ingold (2000, 2011), Michael Jackson (1983,

1996), Carla Stang (2012 [2009]), Paul Stoller (1989, 1997), and Michael Taussig

(1993). In the field of visual anthropology, and addressing the senses in particular, I should mention David MacDougall (1998, 2006), Sarah Pink (2006, 2007), Elizabeth

Edwards (1992; Edwards and Bhaumik 2008) and Anna Grimshaw (2001; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009). Their works are valuable and relevant for my research, as they deal with lived experience, embodied knowledge, reciprocal and reflexive processes, and people’s engagement with their life-world. Tim Ingold (2000) has developed the idea of sensory apprenticeship drawing on notions of skill, embodied practice, and tacit knowledge. This involves active and ongoing participation of people in the sense of a relational approach to each other and also to the surrounding environment. He suggests that understanding vision is possible mainly through its interrelationship with the other senses: hearing in particular (Ingold uses an example of an approaching train and argues that looking and listening are aspects of one activity, 2000: 243). He argues that all sensory modalities, including vision, should not be separated from actual practices. In the case of vision this involves looking, watching, and seeing

(Ingold 2000: 286). In my account of Ambonwari visual practices, I aimed at a better understanding of the visual experience through a dialogic approach in creating audio- visual material with Ambonwari and also by observing and participating in their ways of seeing things. There is a sense of reciprocity when looking at the images, especially when seeing oneself through the eyes of others, as it is in traditional gift exchange or ceremonial displays as known in Papua New Guinea. The performer and spectator

> Introduction 22 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

exchange their perspectives (Strathern 2013). The dialogic approach in this sense is not only about sensory experience but also about its communicative dimension.

The human capacity for image-based communication provides an alternate means of apprehending and acting upon the world. Michael Taussig (1993) addresses optical tactility in the context of mimesis and argues that the visibility of mimesis should be understood as a mode of sensuous knowledge, and not simply as copying or imitation.

He refers to mimesis as the capacity to relate to the ‘other’ in an instant contact between the perceiver and perceived that is sensuous, visceral and relational (Taussig

1993: 19-21). Michael Jackson’s (1996) ongoing focus on the phenomenology of everyday life, existential issues and human experience generally, is also relevant in this context. One of his earlier studies (Jackson 1983) was about bodily movement among the Kuranko people of Sierra Leone. Through initiation rites a novice is led to believe that what is done with the body becomes the ground for what is thought and said. Paul Stoller in his ethnographic exploration of the senses among the Songhay people of Niger calls for ‘sensuous scholarship’, which he defines as being “an attempt to reawaken profoundly the scholar’s body by demonstrating how the fusion of the intelligible and the sensible can be applied to scholarly practices and representations”

(1997: xv). Stoller writes about being an apprentice and learning through his own body, including the incidence of illness and pain, and through sensorial experiences of smell and taste in particular. In his book The Taste of Ethnographic Things, Stoller (1989: 7) asked: “If anthropologists are to produce knowledge, how can they ignore how their own sensual biases affect the information they produce?” For him:

> Introduction 23 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

An ethnographic discourse that ‘comes face to face with the real world only at

rare intervals’ is usually so turgid that it is digestible by only a few dedicated

specialists – a discourse that will soon be forgotten. A tasteful ethnographic

discourse that takes the notion of melange as its foundation would encourage

writers to blend the ingredients of a world so that bad sauces might be

transformed into delicious prose (Stoller 1989: 32).

More precisely, in the introduction to the reader Empire of the Senses, Howes (2005:

6) says: “The most elucidating cultural studies of the senses are those that bring out indigenous theories of perception”. Howes also writes that many scholars are still suspicious about the study of the senses fearing that the writing will be vague and overemotional, losing that intellectual precision characteristic of urban, technological, and market oriented rationalism. While I explored all the above mentioned sensory experiences through participating in different Ambonwari practices and trying to share the intricacies of their lives, I did not want to romanticise their existence, but rather I engaged in a dialogic relationship in which the cameras became active participants.

This created a quite different ethnographic setting from the ordinary participant observation.

The anthropology of senses has developed into a distinctive field of study and the scholars working in this field do reflect upon their research in a much broader way.

Carla Stang, for example, based her research with the Mehinaku people of Brazil on

> Introduction 24 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

lived experience by asking: “What is the Mehinaku sense of reality like, especially their experience of life when nothing in particular is going on?” (2012 [2009]: 1). She sees the significance of her investigation “in the simple fact that most of peoples’ lives are, as it happens, constituted by these ordinary moments, and, if only for this reason, are important for an anthropologist to explore” (Stang ibid.). In the past these issues were less talked about and the emphasis was primarily put on social and cultural ‘facts’ that filled monographs about unknown communities and their ritualized practices. The

‘ordinary’ life was not considered significant enough to be written about.

Phenomenology was regarded to be rather a subfield of philosophy than of anthropology. Edwards and Bhaumik in their introduction to the Visual Sense reader, take the phenomenological point of view in a more applied sense as “a domain of knowledge inseparable from the world in which people actually live and act” (2008: 7).

Visual anthropology, in my view, deals directly with the senses, seeing and hearing in particular, and requires the viewer to engage with audio-visual material differently than one does with the written text (see Chapter One). A film offers visible particularities of a certain place and time. These are concrete, seen and heard. Watching a film is about looking and placing oneself into that particular place and time through one’s sensory experience and perception. Following David Bordwell, “[h]owever much the spectator may be engaged by plot or genre, subject matter or thematic implication, the texture of the film experience depends centrally upon the moving images and the sound that accompanies them. The audience gains access to story or theme only through that tissue of sensory materials” (1997: 7). Therefore, to get a better sense of

> Introduction 25 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Ambonwari sensual engagements, their audio-visual life-world, and that everyday lived experience of which Stang talked about, I produced a film ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’, in which I avoided following any particular narrative. I wanted to capture the Ambonwari physical environment, my and people’s sensory experience of this environment, and convey it to the senses of the viewers. I employed several recording techniques to bring the sense of the Ambonwari space into view, such as, for example, walking with the camera through the forest and learning to see different edible greens, paddling and fishing with the women, bathing and looking together at the same trees and sharing our views. Anthropological films “rarely adopt the actual visual perspectives of individuals”, writes David MacDougall (2011: 111). “Rather,” he continues, “figuratively and literally, they look over their shoulders, staying close to them through different events. Viewers come to understand others’ feelings not by experiencing them directly, but by vicariously sharing their social interactions and physical surroundings”

(MacDougall ibid.). It was Ambonwari, who pushed me into embodied, experiential, and sensual understanding between arɨm ‘skin’ and wambung ‘understanding’. I am convinced that regardless of different arɨmbas ‘skins’ and different wambunggar

‘understandings’, the primary world of senses can be shared in a more accurate way by combining the audio-visual and textual means. In contrast to the short videos, photographs, and drawings incorporated in the text and made by me and Ambonwari, the film renders my journey in Ambonwari worlds. It is a parallel work, not a supplement or an audio-visual representation of the text. The film reflects two different perspectives from two different ‘skins’ I was able to exchange: one of an Ambonwari and the other one of a ‘white woman’. These perspectives are interrelated as my

> Introduction 26 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

writing in the following chapters and as the film shows. The dialogic editing in my film can thus be perceived through a juxtaposition of different images and sounds that convey the sense of the place as people themselves live and sense it. The film shows the rhythm of living in and of the environment inhabited by many different animals and plants and the way I and Ambonwari experienced it in 2011.

Visual anthropology is usually described as a cross-section between art and human sciences. It has always been an aesthetic practice. In her book Experimental

Ethnography, Catherine Russell writes that “[e]thnography may even be considered an experimental practice in which aesthetics and cultural theory are combined in a constantly evolving formal combination” (1999: 14). Production of ethnographic film, ethnographic photo essays, interactive multimedia exhibitions, or works made in collaboration between artists and anthropologists are experimental practices generating both academic and applied research outcomes. “While of course a video camera cannot record touch, taste or smell as it does sound and image”, writes Sarah

Pink, “it nevertheless has potential to represent the multisensoriality of the research encounter” (2011: 608). In their book Observational Cinema, Grimshaw and Ravetz write that most importantly “visual anthropology has begun to emerge as the critical site for a convergence of different perspectives around the visual” (2009: xii). Defining the observational cinema as a fundamentally phenomenological enterprise, they see observational filmmaking as a mode of anthropological inquiry where the skill and sensibility of the filmmaker challenges new expressions of knowledge-in-the-making

(Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009: 130-136). In line with these authors, I argue in Part I of

> Introduction 27 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

my thesis, that making images is a way of engaging with the world. It is a way to give shape to something in distinctively aesthetic form the lived experience that is concrete, sensory, and in the same time a relational perspective and practice.

Seeing and Hearing in Papua New Guinea and Beyond

“With sunrise, tree leaves begin to flutter in the wind as birds swell in counterpoint.

Pigeons, whistlers, parrots, butcherbirds, grackles, coucals, and birds of paradise announce the dawn. People wake and begin cracking firewood, talking and rustling around to the attendant sounds of domestic pigs and dogs. By 8 a.m. the village is empty” (Feld 2001: 51, Disc 2, song 10). Steven Feld is one of a few anthropologists who brought the sounds, rhythms, poetics, and songs of everyday life into academic discussion. His study of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea and his audio CD are about the informal sounds and songs of work and leisure in people’s daily life. He begins his written annotation to CD II: Sounds and Songs of Everyday Life in the following way:

When you live in a Bosavi village, it doesn’t take long to realize that

soundmaking is a key feature of everyday work and recreation throughout the

community. Acts of assertion, affection, and appeal are constant features of the

daily social interactions I’ve experienced in Bosavi, and their public display is

often demonstrably vocal and instrumental. Sentiments and nostalgias,

energies and emotions are constantly projected into public auditory space (Feld

2001: 45).

> Introduction 28 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

This unconventional sound work was created as a response to Kaluli questions to Feld that challenged the authority, meaning and context of his written work about them. It happened that in 1982 Feld’s newly published book Sound and Sentiment had arrived to the area when he was there. This was a great opportunity for Feld to share his writings, work on birds, weeping, songs, myths and poetics with the people he was studying and living with. The Kaluli, nevertheless, questioned the abstractions, summaries, generalizations and impersonal parts, as Feld writes in his postscript in the second edition of Sound and Sentiment (1990). They asked questions like “who said that?” or “who told him that?” (Feld 1990 [1982]: 252). They wanted to hear the reports as they happened, from direct experience of concrete people. Feld calls this process a dialogic editing. He writes:

I think of the forms of ethnographic discourse that developed in these

encounters as a dialogic editing, negotiations of what Kaluli and I said to,

about, with, and through each other, juxtapositions of Kaluli voices and my

own. This multiplicity of voices and views animates the dialogic dimension

here, and unmasks editing practices to open questions about rights, authority,

and the power to control which voices talk when, how much, in what order, in

what language. Dialogic editing refers to the impact of Kaluli voices on what I

tell you about them in my voice; how their take on my take on them requires a

reframing and a refocusing of my account (Feld 1990 [1982]: 243-244).

> Introduction 29 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

In visual anthropology, it was Jean Rouch, who pioneered a dialogic approach in ethnographic filmmaking. His films were outcomes of a collaborative engagement in, and discussion about what to film and how to film it. Rouch liked to call it ciné-dialogue

(Feld 2003: 185). His films became known as ethno-fiction created on the basis of blurring the line between documentary and fiction film for a rather more ethnographic and imaginative integration. Nowadays, visual anthropology needs to engage in more innovative, but also in-depth, dialogic and collaborative projects with the people that are the subjects of visual research projects. Such an approach will lead towards a better understanding of one’s collaborators’ and one’s own cultural world in a form of coexistence. It is a simultaneous process.

It has been claimed that ‘vision’ and ‘oculocentrism’ have determined the Western world’s sensory orientation, especially in the 20th century (Jay 1993), and that other cultures have cultivated and privileged other sensory practices, for example, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and so on (Levin 1993). It has also been said that to study vision in small-scale non-European communities is to impose a Eurocentric perspective (ibid.). My view, however, is rather on the side of those who see the senses as being closely interrelated. Moreover, senses are context dependent, and it is the context that privileges a particular sense or requires a particular sensorial attention more than the other. When it comes to ‘manipulation of the senses’, both sound and image, for example, can be disturbing (Ingold 2000). In her book

Shimmering Screens, Jennifer Deger critically approaches the influence of media on an Aboriginal community of Yolngu people in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory,

> Introduction 30 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Australia. She writes that “Yolngu bodies are pervious to images and sounds since subjects are constituted in the world through perception. Moreover, different sights and sounds have different effects: audiences become different kinds of [sensually engaged] subjects depending on what they see and listen to” (Deger 2006: 77).

Through her collaboration and co-creating sensory experiences through modern media, she participated in reconstituting the Yolngu identity via technology. Deger argues that being exposed to mediated experience through television, video players, or radios, the people felt a misplacement of their own identity, but at the same time they gained a capability of a bifocal vision of culture, that is the one of Yolngu and also one of ‘white people’ (2006: 79).

There are cross-cultural similarities in sensing the world. There are, however, big differences in access to technology and in the history of media transmission in different countries and regions, which influence a general knowledge about worldwide productions. There are no discrepancies in spite of technological differences in the sense that

the senses enable an invisible traversing of the space between subject and

object; the senses let things into the body, even as they extend the corporeal

field beyond the bounds of the skin. Vision links two otherwise separate things

– the seer and the seen. Sound fills the spaces between something or

someone making a sound and the ears of those who hear it, enveloping both in

a perceptual field (Deger 2006: 81).

> Introduction 31 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

With their adage ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’, the Ambonwari clearly indicate this kind of reciprocal sensory engagement with the world around them, and the one beyond, connected to my, and the cameras’, presence. The audio-visual methods facilitated many discussions about the seeing and hearing connected to particular practices and places. It became important to show a place rather than just describe it. The foreign places seen in a film led to discussions about the ancestors and places one goes after death. Through watching the movies that I screened, people felt connected to the distant world in an engaged way. Sometimes, the healers, in particular, recalled their dreams which evoked to them sensory experiences similar to those experienced when watching the films. People instantly learned something new when watching and they often discussed different issues during the days following a screening.

There has been relatively little research done regarding sensory experience in Papua

New Guinea. Amongst the few, there is the interesting account by Donald Tuzin about ideas concerning smell among the Ilahita Arapesh people of East Sepik Province.

Following his observations in the field, he came to the conclusion that smell among the

Ilahita Arapesh is a medium of shared substance and of mutual trust and identity. He argued, that the “Ilahita judge smell to be the distillation of physical and, more importantly, moral essences – of goodness and badness, of purity and pollution”

(Tuzin 2006: 61). Tuzin, in another article (1984), also touches upon hearing and claims that the aural is the privileged mode of ritual experiences. Alfred Gell working with Umeda people in the West Sepik of Papua New Guinea equally suggested the

> Introduction 32 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

predominance of hearing over seeing, but also stressed that the Umeda did not rely on

“hearing to the exclusion of all else, but... [that] the relationship between the visual and auditory components of their ambience was differently evaluated than it is with us”

(1995: 238). In addition to Steven Feld, Edward and Bambi Schieffelin also developed a specific interest in sound and saw the Kaluli as being embraced by a ‘hearing culture’. All three anthropologists worked among the same group, the Kaluli, living on the Great Papuan Plateau in the Southern Highlands Province of PNG. Bambi

Schieffelin (1990) wrote a detailed study about child language acquisition and linguistic socialization of children, and how speech shapes and is shaped by reciprocity and social relationships. Edward Schieffelin (1976: 95) wrote that animals and birds are perceived more by the sounds they make than by their appearance. Sound, in

Schieffelin’s words, “brings to awareness not objects, but movements, activities, and events, to which the Kaluli are ever alert” (ibid.: 96). Feld’s main argument is that in a dense rainforest, auditory perception is in a tense dialectic with vision: while much of the forest is visually concealed, sound cannot be hidden. It seems to be a quite sensible conclusion when we imagine ourselves in a jungle overgrown by trees, vines and bushes with limited horizon. This kind of dense environment then shapes people’s perception, and as a consequence impacts on their behavior and also their social organization. Regardless of Feld’s account, I want to argue that there is always a particular way of looking at things inside the forest (as I write in Part II). Moreover, looking at the Ambonwari sensory expressions and perceptions of their environment, which in addition to rainforest consists of rivers, grasslands, and sago swamp, directs me towards further exploration of the complexity of synaesthesia and simultaneity of

> Introduction 33 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

vision and sound.

David Howes (2003), in his book Sensual Relations, emphasizes the importance of visual display and concealment among the Kwoma people of East Sepik Province. He turns around the debate about the ‘oral societies’ (McLuhan 1962, Ong 1982),

Melanesians being the key examples, saying that the Kwoma are not less ocularcentric than those who live in Western societies (Howes 2003: xviii). Howes points to the specificities of each of the five senses and their interplay, when he compares the Kwoma of Middle Sepik and the Massim people of Milne Bay Province of PNG (2003: 160-172). The Sepik people also became known for their visual arts, paintings, masks, and carvings in particular. One of the first Sepik societies, which became known for their artwork, was the Abelam (Forge 1966, 1967, 1979).

Anthropologist Anthony Forge focused on art as a form of communication and argued that Abelam paintings are a form of language: they mediate things which cannot be readily communicated by any other means (1970: 288).7 The domination of men in this kind of visual communication is characteristic for the whole Sepik region. The best- known examples were the men’s houses and the objects which used to be kept inside.

Women and children were prohibited to see the interior of a men’s house and the objects, which were hidden within. They could see only the skin (exterior of a men’s

7 The Melanesian Archives at the University of California, San Diego hold an excellent archive collection of Forge’s field-notes, photographs, and silent film recordings. I was visiting research student at the archives in 2005-2006 as part of my B.A. studies in Vienna and was able to go through most of this material.

> Introduction 34 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

house) but not its wambung (interior of a men’s house). Howes says that “the men visualize the spirits (or in other words, make representations of them) and are in turn watched over by them” (2003: 139). The Ambonwari women being more grounded and responsible for raising the children learned to ‘sit well’ and ‘press down’ the spirit of the village living under the ground. They were, in the eyes of men, more preoccupied with concrete tactile issues of nourishment than with the representation of the invisible world, divination, and sorcery. Men and women always had, and still have, their own secrets, which are gender specific and are not supposed to be seen by those of another gender. This orientation persists regardless of Christianity uniting male and female domains much more than ever before. The interplay of visible and concealed domains remains the main driver, not only for interpersonal relationships within the village, but also in relation to the distant world. While there exists a general attitude of rejecting the bush spirits, the Ambonwari worship the Holy Spirit, Jesus and God.

Those chosen to posses the power to connect themselves to these invisible deities do not reveal their secrets. This is in many ways similar to the practices of the Big Men from the past. However, there is an important difference: the powers of the Holy Spirit and God are accessible to both men and women.

Perception of the Ethnographer

Throughout the thesis, I touch upon Ambonwari perceptions of the ethnographer and the connected issue of being ‘white’ and ‘black’. Sometimes, I was perceived as an

Ambonwari woman because I could do things as Ambonwari do, for example walking through the bush, paddling on the creeks, processing sago, or eating boiled small fish.

> Introduction 35 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Other times, I was perceived as a stranger, when eating a particular food, which in

Ambonwari view was not considered as being a ‘proper food’ for the main dish, such as, for example, greens, fruits, or seeds. My position was mainly perceived through the eyes of my adoptive family and the kin relationships that ensued from this. A concrete and central element of my kin position was the relationship with my widowed ‘sister’

Augustina Awsay, my living with her and her children in their house, and my relationship with our ‘brothers’ from the Crocodile-1 Clan. My links with Dr. Telban also influenced how I was positioned. Previous anthropological research among the

Ambonwari conducted by Dr. Telban resulted in a monograph and numerous articles.

His primary work did not involve a collaborative experimental sensory exploration, nor did it involve videos and film for that matter. But he and I worked together with the

Ambonwari and his well-established position in the community influenced how people perceived me. Working with Dr. Telban was stimulating for both of us and has resulted in long-term cooperation.

My ‘whiteness’ became visible in certain reactions and practices like recording, projecting recorded material, showing foreign films, or doing taijiquan martial arts in front of the house. Being a ‘white’ woman, I had some special skills that Ambonwari women did not have. I could enter certain domains of the Ambonwari world which were not accessible for other women, regardless of all the changes associated with the gender inequality due to Christianity. Unlike most Ambonwari woman, I could leave the village whenever I wished. I was often doing things that only men were supposed to do, and these activities became the subject of comment. This also sparked many

> Introduction 36 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

questions. I was often asked about ‘my’ world and the world of the spirits. Having an ambiguous role created uncertainty among the Ambonwari. I could be perceived as being both ‘spirit-white’ and ‘human-black’, and the dialectics between the two were omnipresent.

A further factor influencing my positioning among the Ambonwari is that every person, living or dead, is perceived through their kay, that is through their practices and actions. Accordingly, I was sometimes seen as a spirit and sometimes as a living

Ambonwari, as I write in Part III of this thesis. The kay reveals wambung ‘insideness’ and supplements the external appearance or ‘skin’. Wambung opens up the question of the veracity of how a person appears and the relation of this appearance to one’s possible identity. How did this complex of shifting positions, both those asserted by my own actions and intentions and those ascribed to me by the Ambonwari, in fact influence people’s reactions to my questions and my filming? It was not just my position perceived through the eyes of my adoptive family and kin relationships, but also the position of the cameras I brought with me (I develop the specific position and role of the cameras in Chapter Two). I had different roles in different situations. I asked different questions in different roles. I became a catalyst myself, just like the camera did, for eliciting the answers to questions which could not be planned in advance and would not be heard and seen if I would not been able to ‘change my skin’ and my perspectives. All these positions together, eventually, created a new kind of vision for my audio-visual research. The emphasis does not fall so much on the differences, as it does on commonalities and shared knowledge.

> Introduction 37 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

My analytical resolution of these positions, as reflected in this thesis, is via the triangle of relationships between the filmmaker, protagonist, and the viewer. In the eyes of

Australians, Europeans, or Americans, while sharing these thoughts and insights, I could be seen as ‘spirit-black’ or ‘human-white’. Form them too, in a similar way as it did for the Ambonwari, my doings might feel ambiguous and strange. Hence, the veracity of an appearance and its relation to one’s personality is and will continue to be an open-ended discourse. Only in this way, I was able to keep the ambiguous role and capture the spirits without seeing them. I could have answers to some questions which even men were struggling with. I could ask particular questions pertaining to the visible and invisible world often ruled by the men. All these aspects of my different appearances and capabilities have been central for my understanding the Ambonwari world of perceptions and expressions. With this in mind, I am taking you – the readers and viewers – to rediscover the potential of sensory exchange and evoke a new form of ethnographic knowledge.

Outline of Parts and Chapters

The reader is brought into the Ambonwari world as I remembered, photographed and recorded it, and as it was presented to me by the Ambonwari people. My recording with the camera and people’s reactions to, and interactions with it, is the main thread throughout the thesis. Ambonwari drawings, photographs and video recordings, are presented and discussed as a significant part of the audio-visual material made during my year-long fieldwork there. Perceptions and expressions, visible and invisible,

> Introduction 38 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

recorded and screened, seen and heard, dreamed and materialized are all parallel and interrelated realms leading towards the final discussion about the sensory world of

Ambonwari.

In Chapter One, I look into the history of visual anthropology with particular emphasis on the use of the camera in the field. I discuss the perception and expression of a cameraperson being a mediator between what is captured and what is communicated and how this relates to anthropology. I look closer at particular styles, approaches to filming, and authors within the field. I choose a number of audio-visual ethnographies and point at the parallels as well as differences with my project. In Chapter Two I talk about people’s perception of the camera in my hands and also perception of

Ambonwari ‘camerapersons’ in their own environment. At the beginning, the camera was perceived as my extension, and later on, as a being on its own. It became a catalyst for things to happen. It was able to capture spirits and consequently got ‘sick’ and needed to be ‘healed’. Camera as a being had skin, eyes and ears, and wambung.

Initially, I discuss my own identity in the Ambonwari context and the many appearances, which were ascribed to me. Then, I bring the ontological issues of recording with a camera to the forefront. What does one actually see when looking through the camera and what is seen by a viewer? According to Deleuze (2005 [1985]:

147) when one is recording with a camera, both filmmaker and the filmed subject become first ‘another’ and ultimately ‘one’. In the last section of Chapter Two I discuss

> Introduction 39 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

people’s reactions to Ambonwari ‘camerapersons’, the social relations of the camera, in short. Beside the text in this part, the reader can watch several video-clips with compiled recordings made by the Ambonwari.

In Part Two, I move from the camera-perceiver to perceptions and expressions of an

Ambonwari person. In Chapter Three, I bring several case studies into discussion and focus on external appearance, internal understanding, and communication of the seen and heard. The corporeality of an image and a person’s body is addressed simultaneously. I discuss the concept of skin and body, light and dark skin, and present several case studies touching upon this, including a video-clip showing the ritual of rubbing the skin of a newborn baby with a hot leaf. I explore the relationship between seeing and hearing and other senses and ask that the reader watches the videos which accompany the case studies to get a fuller picture of the events and discussed issues. The video shows much more than the ritual itself. In contrast to the written text, the recording works as a catalyst for discussion about the rituals of ‘white people’ and it demonstrates the interactions facilitated by the camera’s presence.

Chapter Three ends with the concept of wambung ‘understanding, feelings and thoughts’. This concept is situated around a case study of a dead body brought to the village. The case is accompanied by three video-clips and a slideshow.

Chapter Four is entitled Ethnography of Communication. I look at different visual signs and sounds as a link between arɨm ‘skin’ and wambung, between the visible and invisible realms, and between people and their environment. We are introduced to the

> Introduction 40 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

visuality of the Ambonwari world through seeing the invisible and making it visible. The signs and images presented in this section, serve, as a catalyst too. It is not as much as capturing the invisible, but rather in seeing it when transformed in other forms. I show this in many dialogues throughout my thesis and point to the fact that there is always an invisible part in the visible. Thus, I make visible the limits and advantages of the audio-visual in this part of my thesis. A short video-clip ‘Rocking Canoe’ tells us about communication with the bush spirits in the past and God in the present. We are explicitly told that these two ways of communicating significantly differ from each other and that people, nowadays, eat less meat than they did in the past due to their rejection of the spirits of the forests and creeks. We do not see the past, we are only told about it by an elder and from today’s point of view.

In the last part of the thesis I examine people’s reflections on particular recordings and films, which we watched together during our public village screenings. I show how the image receives its full meaning only when it is seen by someone else. The understanding of watched movies and the meaning ascribed to them, however, differ according to one’s social and cultural background. In Chapter Five, I offer a brief history of audience studies in PNG and bring attention to the method of film-elicitation.

I discuss the Ambonwari’s reactions to foreign feature films, documentaries or animations and PNG production. I look at the cinematic experience as an entanglement of embodied, sensory, social and cultural memories.

> Introduction 41 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

In the sixth and final Chapter, I discuss how seeing oneself in the image (especially when moving and talking) becomes a surprising moment of self-reflection and identification. Seeing and hearing, in this context, become the fundamental sensory elements of identity through alterity. One can suddenly see oneself with one’s own eyes as if one was someone else. This seeing oneself and others produced many discussions and requests for clarification about the reasons for the differences between the world of ‘white’ and ‘black’ people, and between the spirits and living beings. The watched foreign movies and the recordings made by the Ambonwari themselves became a way of creating new relationships with the unknown audiences.

The poetics of the Ambonwari’s visual, acoustic, and sensual world, as I perceive it, could not be accomplished just with the written text. Thus, the final part of the entire work involves, besides reading the Conclusion, also watching the film ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’.

> Introduction 42 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

PART I: Camera-Eye

Plate 5: Daniel Akwi, my ‘brother’ © Daniela Vávrová 2011

> Part I 43 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Our eye sees very poorly and very little – and so men conceived of the

microscope in order to see invisible phenomena; and they discovered the

telescope in order to see and explore distant, unknown worlds. The movie

camera was invented in order to penetrate deeper into the visible world, to

explore and record visual phenomena, so that we do not forget what

happens and what the future must take into account (Dziga Vertov 1926;

quoted in Michelson 1984: 67).1

The innovative views of the Russian filmmaker Vertov, from the 1920s, have in many ways become the reality of the present. “Technology is moving swiftly ahead.

...In the near future man will be able to broadcast to the entire world the visual and auditory phenomena recorded by the radio-movie camera [synchronized sound and image recording]” (Vertov 1925; quoted in Michelson 1984: 56). Recording without staging, as Vertov called his filmic style, was to experience life as it unfolds in front of one’s eyes. Filmmaking without acting became the basis not only for documentary filmmaking, but also for the ethnographic film.

At the dawn of the filmmaking it was difficult to move around with the large size cameras. Nowadays, one can choose from an enormous variety of pocket-size and consumer-friendly cameras in dual mode, that is, they can be used to photograph

1 The English translation of the article is titled Kino-Eye (Cinema-Eye), which is precisely what Kinoglaz in Russian meant. Vertov chose the name and gave it to the movement and group of which he was the founder and leader. “The term was also used to designate their method of work”, writes Annette Michelson, who together with Kevin O’Brian edited a book of Dziga Vertov’s writings (1984: 5). The main collaborators were Vertov’s brother Mikhail Kaufman, the cameraman, and Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova, the editor. David Abelevich Kaufman or Dziga Vertov was born to Jewish intellectuals in Bialystok in 1896 (then part of Russia but now in Poland) and died forgotten in Moscow in 1954. For further readings about Vertov see Hicks (2007) and Tsivian (2004).

> Part I 44 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

as well as to film. These visual records then serve as a person’s extensions and source of his or her memories. A visual record enables one to show and prove that one was there at a particular place at a particular time. The new media, which includes not only photographs and films, but also mobile phone communication,

Internet social networks, and information spread through radio and television, has become living extensions of many people (McLuhan 1994 [1964]; Sontag 2002

[1971]; Turkle 2011). Is it that by preserving a moment on a strip of film or a digital card one’s sensory experiences are quicker to recall? On the one hand yes. The temporal and spatial condensation in the image leaves in us a stamp of the fine- grained actualities, which we or others were experiencing (Barthes 2000 [1980]).

The image not only transforms our memories but it also intensifies them. When looking at a photograph or watching a film one recalls past experiences of places, moments, voices, light, smell and encounters with people. One feels closer to

‘there’ than ‘here’ at the moment of looking at the image. On the other hand, one could say, the apparent revelation of the past tricks us and makes us more distant to our own presence. In her critical writings on image-making, Susan Sontag stated that “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own” (2002 [1971]: 57). Film, in contrast to photography being a still moment, is a flow of still frames which creates a filmic copy of lived experience in motion. Buck-Morss discusses spectatorship and writes that “[t]he cinema image is the recorded, kinetic trace of an absence. It is the present image of an object that has either disappeared or perhaps never existed. In short, it is the form – one of the Ur-forms – of the simulacrum” (1994: 49). There is, however, much more to it.

The images bring a message to the spectators. The appearance is a kind of knowledge, which is not only kinaesthetic but also conceptual. The images, nowadays, accumulate rapidly and one stores them not as much for oneself as for

> Part I 45 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

the future generations. Moreover, one shares the captured moments with others on the World Wide Web. Regarding this, Vertov got it absolutely right. His intention was to understand each other through seeing and hearing. In the Ambonwari context the images, photographs and films made of them and by them, are about remembering past appearances and experiences. The images of other people and places, though recognised as a part of the past, are also about the future and possible forthcoming relationships. The images then are a visible link between the past and the future and between the actual ‘here’ and the possible ‘there’.

The notion of photography, documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, has changed in accordance with the use of cameras. In the first part of the thesis, and

Chapter One in particular, I look into the history of visual anthropology with the emphasis on the use of the camera. This includes both photography and film. With the advance of technology, the tools for recording visual imagery became an indispensable part of an ethnographer’s equipment in the field. From a simple documentation of societies and their cultures, ethnographic filmmakers started to make a statement via the audio-visual medium and more importantly they succeeded in sharing the outcomes with the people on a different basis than was the case with the written records. In the first Chapter, I discuss the perception and expression of a cameraperson as being a mediator between what is captured and what is communicated. In my view, the ultimate starting point for this debate, beside the intention of a cameraperson, is human perception. Authors such as

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Vivian Sobchack, David MacDougall, and Gilles Deleuze are continually in the background of my thoughts when trying to understand the camerawork in the Ambonwari context.

> Part I 46 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

In Chapter Two, I discuss the Ambonwari’s perception of the camera in my hands.

The tool for capturing images was considered as my extension since my first visit to the village in 2005. People were surprised and questioned me when the camera was not with me. During my long-term stay in the village in 2011, each of the cameras I brought with me got a name, and together with me, entered particular social relationships. From the Ambonwari perspective, once something gets a name, it becomes a being on its own. This camera ‘being’, however, is always handled by someone, the cameraperson, which means that one cannot exist without the other. The name puts a being-object into a social framework, which includes the world of the spirits, and in many ways determines its actions. From an anthropological perspective the cameraperson is then an agent who mediates social and cultural intricacies. In the section about Camera as Catalyst, I discuss this active engagement noting that without the presence of the camera many things would not be heard, seen, or told and would actually not even happen. Another level of perception and expression connected to the understanding of particular cultural settings is elicited when the camera is handled by a local person and not an outsider. In the last section of Chapter Two, I discuss the perception of

Ambonwari ‘camerapersons’ in their own environment and look closer at how we give different priorities to what should be recorded and what not.

> Part I 47 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

CHAPTER One: Camera in the Field

The Use of the Camera in Visual Anthropology

Audio-visual ethnography has a long history in anthropology. It is complemented by a number of written accounts, analytical and theoretical, which discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different visual approaches and cinematic strategies. The pioneers in using visual methods in ethnographic research at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century were Alfred C. Haddon, Félix-

Louis Regnault, F. E. Williams, Walter B. Spencer, as well as Franz Boas and

Bronislaw Malinowski. The latter two are perceived as the founders of American cultural anthropology and British social anthropology respectively. Both Boas and

Malinowski did not fancy cameras as such and struggled with the technicalities and aesthetics of the medium, but they nevertheless used the cameras to capture as many details as possible in support of other data and analyses in their writings.2 In the 1930s Margaret Mead, Boas’ student, and Gregory Bateson further explored the possibilities of applying visual methods in anthropological research, at that time

2 Franz Boas’ photographic and filmic work among the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) people of the coast of British Columbia was discussed, for example, by Ruby (2000) and Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork photography in Kiriwina of Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, by Young (1998).

> Part I 48 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

known as ‘non-verbal‘ anthropology.3 In the 1960s they proposed to call the field

Visual Anthropology. Their proposal was accepted. Throughout the following years the use of visual methods became common practice among fieldworkers. It provoked a dialogue about how to handle the camera and what one can actually show with it in a particular socio-cultural setting.4 On the one hand, as Marcus

Banks argues, “most academics would acknowledge that of all the social science disciplines it is anthropology, in the form of visual anthropology, that has made most use of visual materials in the course of research” (2001: x). On the other hand, the following can be said about anthropology:

Anthropology has had no lack of interest in the visual; its problem has

always been what to do with it... Vast archives of record footage remain

unseen and unused. Sophisticated analysts of other societies profess

ignorance and alarm when it comes to analyzing the structure of an

ethnographic film. To anthropology the visual often seems

uncommunicative and yet somehow insatiable. Like the tar baby, it never

says anything, but there is always something more to be said about it

(MacDougall 2006: 213, 217).

3 While doing their photographic research on the Balinese character between 1936 and 1938, Mead and Bateson used a 35 mm Leica camera and mostly Elmar 50 mm lens. The films were made with 16 mm Movikon with a hand-winder and no sound (Bateson and Mead 1942: 52; Jacknis 1988).

4 See discussion between Mead and Bateson in The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (Mead and Bateson 2002: 41-46).

> Part I 49 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Following constant innovations in technology and its general accessibility and affordability, the use of audio-visual techniques became, however, very widespread.5

Audio-visual recordings are useful not only in terms of data collection, but also in terms of the possibility of producing a final product, an audio-visual statement about the research in addition to the written form. The present day recognition of a distinctly visual anthropology, the recording technology, had to go through many years of development. From Robert Flaherty’s silent film recordings and implementation of ‘participatory camera’ (Barsam 1988, Ruby 2000, Henley 2009),

John Collier’s time-sequence photography and the first methodology for doing visual research (Collier and Collier 1986 [1967], Hockings 2003 [1974]), to Sol

Worth’s exploration with film communication (Worth and Adair 1970, 1972; Ruby

2000) and indigenous media (Turner 1992; Ginsburg 2002, 2006), visual anthropology moved to another level of photographic, filmic and cinematic experience. In the genealogy of visual anthropology, documentary approaches went hand in hand with ethnographic ones (El Guindi 2004). On the British documentary scene, in 1930s, it was John Grierson who talked about the creative treatment of actuality and founded the British school of realistic documentary film.

In the 1960s, Cinéma-Vérité in France and Direct Cinema in the USA, moved filming to a new dimension of socio-cultural interaction (see below). The ethnographic filmmakers of 1970s and 1980s, including French cinematic griot

Jean Rouch, John Marshall, David and Judith MacDougall, Gary Kildea, and

Robert Gardner, to mention a few, used the synchronized 16 mm camera as a

5 The issues presented in this part of Chapter One have been discussed at length in my M. A. Thesis (Vávrová 2008) as well as in the article Doing Audio-visual Ethnography. From Silent Film to Hypermedia (Vávrová 2009).

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further step in audio-visual innovation.6 The ethnographic film was accepted as a film genre and became an important teaching tool in anthropology. From simple observational and methodical recording, anthropologists embarked on something that Jean Rouch called ‘shared ciné-anthropology’ when the anthropologists will pass the camera into the hands of the people (Rouch 1973; quoted in Feld 2003:

45-46).

For an ethnographic filmmaker, using Gilles Deleuze’ words, “[w]hat constitutes part of the film is interesting oneself in the people more than in the film, in the

‘human problems’ more than in the ‘problems of mise-en-scène’, so that the people do not pass over to the side of the camera without the camera having passed over to the side of the people” (2005 [1985]: 149). We know that a camera is not like a human eye and that its use depends on the person who controls it and on those who are in front of it. It is used not only for portraying different cultural environments, peoples’ practices and their relationships, but particularly for making the audio-visual accounts. There may also be reflections upon and interpretations of those who are filmed (see Chapters Five and Six). Film takes the form of a narrative from a particular theme, which is in the ethnographer’s interest. The structure of the film can be taken from the inquiry or the event filmed. “Much of the rest is [however] filtered through the testimony of participants, whose own vested interests must be taken into account” wrote David MacDougall (1998: 208). Thus

6 “The griot is above all a bard, a person who sings praises to the ancestors, to the life of the past. The griot is also the custodian of a society’s traditions, the one who maintains and reinforces the links between present and past … For the Songhay, ethnographers are griots. Like griots, they learn a body of cultural and historical knowledge. Unlike griots, they shape this knowledge into books and films” (Stoller 1992: xvi, 220).

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the camera records more than one can observe during the process of recording. A person behind the camera is connected with a person in front of the camera. They are in a filmic relationship. One is with another, one gets something from another, and one gives something to another.7 The camera is a medium – both of and for perceptions. It creates, as well as distorts, perceptions. It cuts up the world, reduces it as well as enhances the moment beyond the frame.

Jean Rouch saw the camera as an important tool playing the catalytic role in the film-process. Participation and ‘provocation’ of a cameraperson-cum-camera bring into being words and situations, which would otherwise be unsaid or unseen.

Perception and understanding of body language, for example, which has a particular meaning in its own social and cultural environment, are often interpreted differently by someone – the viewer – whose perceptual experience was shaped in a different cultural environment. A film, for example, provides visual contextualization of the speech act, including physical specificities such as body postures, gesture, movement, and other forms of motion. A film also provides a visual background for acoustic issues such as rhythm, stress, pause, pitch, tone, loudness, and so on. This is important when dealing with people’s verbal expressions and their ways of speaking. One could say that in the case of a film recorded in a socially and culturally unfamiliar environment, which is one of the distinctive features of an ethnographic film, a person is often faced with unusual, non-habitual, and even shocking events, practices, and sayings.

7 The relationship between the filming and filmed person has been discussed in-depth by Jean Lydall and Ivo Strecker (2006: 138-156).

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The dynamic effect of successive images, as Gilles Deleuze writes (2005 [1985]), relies on montage to produce the organic totality, the whole as the concept, the whole that is thought, and the whole that goes beyond the imagination and the narrative. It becomes a unity of perceived and expressed (see also Suhr and

Willerslev 2012). Thought-montage is a process that brings audio-visual to that stage when seeing and hearing are not the right terms for perception anymore but one feels and one thinks the whole. Western anthropological theories are often partial, focusing on a particular approach and using particular concepts that fit that approach (cf. Otto and Bubandt 2010). They go hand in hand with political, economical, social, and cultural movements and modifications taking place in the world. The audio-visual accounts in anthropological research offer something that written accounts cannot with their distinctive epistemological properties. We could say that a filmic story and its plot can make equally important anthropological points as a written text (i.e. Gary Kildea’s film Koriam’s Law 2005; Deger 2007 review of Kildea’s film). Any image is part of a narrative which conveys social actions. It uses a distinctive coding mechanism. Because of its corporeality, “[t]he image speaks directly to the senses and emphasizes the human body” (Crawford and Postma 2006: 2). The written text offers a different type of engagement based on the meanings, analyses, and concepts. Film is concerned with a mind-body representation that is visual, aural, verbal, conceptual, and enactive. Its socio- cultural background as a complex whole situates people’s actions, and produces an experience that is both felt and thought about. Thus, an ethnographic film mediates intricacies and complexities of people’s daily lives more from an ontological position than aesthetically a staged one (cf. Bazin 2005 [1971]: 66, 183 for discussion about Italian Neorealism), and more in “unprivileged camera style” than in privileged camera style characteristic for Hollywood and fiction films in

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particular (MacDougall 1998: 199). Ethnographic film’s communicative strength goes beyond the mise en scène of a film and beyond the theoretical enquiry of a text.

Currently, hypermedia, digitalization, and CD-ROMs are often used in education, including the one related to visual anthropology. Regarding ethnographic film, digital video has become a more flexible and applicable tool than Super 8 and 16 mm film cameras, and it is widely used by students. The advantages of digital recording in documentation and education have become evident in fields such as medicine and health, tourism, heritage and industry (Pink 2007). There are new challenges facing ethnographic film in the world of hypermedia. Sarah Pink writes:

“Hypermedia has the capacity (depending on how it is authored) to reflect, imitate and deconstruct aspects of different genres of anthropological film and writing”

(2006: 108). She calls for a resituating and rethinking of the identity of visual anthropology. David MacDougall, however, points out the following:

Sequential media such as writing can explore many kinds of complexity,

depending upon the strategies employed. The conventions of expository

writing in the human sciences have tended to limit these strategies. Film

(and video) is both sequential and composite … sound films have long been

multimedia creations, combining visual, written, oral, temporal, and auditory

elements. Hypermedia, while it expands the possibilities of contextualization

almost infinitely, also risks dissolving the integrity of an authored work,

which normally guides the audience interpretively through a single set of

experiences (2006: 62-63, italics in original).

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Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz (anthropologist and artist) write that

“[o]bservational cinema foregrounds the power of sensuous detail, its ability to enter the viewer’s consciousness and stay there” (2009: 136), which in my view is taken away by an interactive medium such as hypermedia, where the unity of a film in terms of its sensory experience is lost. Moreover, Grimshaw and Ravetz further write that the techniques and aesthetic of observational cinema “can be appraised as constitutive of a reflexive praxis, a way of doing anthropology that has the potential to creatively fuse the object and medium of inquiry” (ibid., italics in the original). The filmic and photographic productions, however, nowadays hardly gain a consensus in critical reviews. They are used in many fields of an inquiry. This has resulted, on the one hand, in extreme freedom of expression and production and, on the other, in a large number of works of low quality, and not only in visual anthropology. In the British film magazine Sight & Sound, Nick Roddick wrote “what we used to (and indeed still do) call ‘film’ has become just another series of moving images vying for our attention in a world saturated with such things. Once the exclusive domain of the cinema, the moving image is now the foremost currency of our time, bombarding us from phones, laptops, shops and escalators, set free from the exclusive embrace of the movies” (May 2012: 15). Filmography has been overrun by videography and digitalisation, production is uncontrollable, and the impact noticeable. From Lumière brothers’ reproduction to Vertov’s manifested

‘truth’ and from Flaherty’s and Rouch’s realism of fiction to MacDougall’s approach going beyond observational cinema, we have arrived at the point where we are dealing with very different kinds of audio-visual messages. What needs to be recognized in ethnographic filmmaking is the veracity of every possible story, and the anthropologist-filmmaker’s equally authentic attitude towards himself or herself,

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towards photography and film as a medium, towards photographed or filmed people, and towards the general public.

Ways of Engaging With the World

There are several approaches to filming which have developed within visual anthropology. David MacDougall in his book on film, senses and ethnography writes about the following variety of approaches with the camera:

They represent different temperaments and aims, not different moralities. In

a single film, several approaches may be employed for separate purposes.

Thus, a responsive camera observes and interprets its subject without

provoking or disturbing it. It responds rather than interferes. An interactive

camera, on the contrary, records its own interchanges with the subject. A

constructive camera interprets its subject by breaking it down and

reassembling it according to some external logic (2006: 4, my emphases).

How we handle the camera is not only a matter of intention, but also of skill or

‘enskillment’, being the processual learning that generates knowledge (Ingold

2000; Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009). The more we are familiar with the camera, and the more we know the place and people with whom we are engaged, the more in- depth accounts we may create of the portrayed life-worlds. I am not referring here to the quality of actual information, the number of issues covered, or some political or any other relevance of the filmic account, but to the talent, imagination, and primarily to the sensitivity which underlies the recorded material and is beyond measure. Engaged visual anthropologists slowly modify their activities according to the intricacies of their long-term engagements with their subjects while going

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beyond the surface that is usually available to a temporary casual observer. In other words, the growth of intimacy which develops over a longer period of time influences the ways in which one looks at and frames the contents of one’s recordings. Let’s have a closer look now at particular styles and authors within the field of visual anthropology. I present and discuss some audio-visual ethnographies and point to the parallels as well as differences with my project in the Ambonwari village.

One of the great challenges in ethnographic film is montage. In classical works, the anthropologists did not put much emphasis on editing, but preferred a natural flow and linear succession of events. If a ritual, for example, lasted several days, the audio-visual account was also very long, spread over several hours (i.e. Towards

Baruya Manhood, the total running time for nine films is 7 hours and 45 minutes).

This approach follows the stick-to-the-facts attitude where every carefully chosen detail, even seemingly most unimportant ones, contributes towards a whole picture of an event. In such a case the voice or perspective of an observer seems to be hardly present. The editing, however, creates or re-creates a story and the editor becomes its co-creator.

One of the more recent films made in Papua New Guinea that shows great mastery of editing is Koriam’s Law and the Dead Who Govern (2005) made by Gary Kildea in cooperation with filmmaker Andrea Simon and anthropologist Andrew Lattas.

The film is, on the one hand, about people’s ideas, dreams and wishes, the visible and invisible, spirits and well being, and on the other hand about the fieldwork and engagement of an anthropologist. One of the characters in the film says that many people, including anthropologists, talk about ‘cargo cults’ taking place all around

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PNG. He adds that the people of Matong village of East New Britain Province in

PNG do not wait for any cargo just passively sitting under the trees. Instead, the members of the Pomio Kivung movement, which started in 1964 with Koriam and two other charismatic leaders, believe that the money and food they offer to the dead and give to the government will bring them know-how for a true development.

The cemetery is called ‘the city’. It is a place, where a signboard is erected with the names of all those who have died. The mastery of editing in this film is about disclosing the invisible power of the spirits to the viewers. It is about lingering in the spaces between the living and the dead, about bringing forward people’s struggle to understand it and make it ‘tangible’ for everyone. This is achieved with the edited dialogues between the anthropologist, the local prophet, his followers, and the filmmaker, which make us the viewers continuously question what film makes us see and experience. In other words as Jennifer Deger writes in her review of the film:

It is about the relationships and accountings that figure and refigure the

spaces of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. It’s about incommensurate gaps (not

simply of culture, but of history, race and global economics) and the efforts

that the people of the Pomio Kivung movement are making to refigure their

lives by attending the productive spaces between the living and the dead,

and between the apparent realities of the surface world and the hidden

significances of the underground realm of their ancestors who hold the key

to future development, prosperity and equality (2007: 250).

During my fieldwork in Ambonwari, people also talked about their ancestors hiding the truth from them and keeping the know-how of all the things and procedures just

> Part I 58 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

for themselves (see Part III of this thesis for further discussions about this in connection to watching foreign feature films). The Ambonwari are involved not just in ordinary issues of Catholic Church, but in the Catholic charismatic movement as well. It is this movement which intensifies people’s anticipation of receiving the service and the know-how from their deceased relatives. One could expect that people would give up if things do not get materialised, but they do not. There is always something new that pushes them to pursue their expectations further. One of the charismatic leaders, Robin, explained to me, just as Pomio Kivung leaders do in the film Koriam’s Law, that prophecy is given in dreams and that creating a balance between the spirits of the dead and the bush spirits is important. To walk on the right path is to know the Bible in detail, suppress one’s own desires, and look and listen attentively to everything that is going on. Only then, he said, one will be blessed and will find not only peace but money too.

Lattas, the anthropologist who features in the film, writes that the “[v]illagers reinvent both modern and customary mediums of disclosure so as to create new ways of seeing and knowing through the emplacing, mirroring power of their environment” (2010: 106). To make a film with such a density of ideas and meanings, an editor often thinks of including sequences that can relax the viewer.

Kildea achieves this with silent transitions to the bay and the sea, with scenes that are without talking but entirely about actions, but also with the anthropologist being engaged in discussions or joking with the Pomio prophet Peter Avereh in particular.

Where most of the filmmakers would shorten the sequences, Kildea does not. He lets us always see a bit more than the ‘official’ sequence requires, he deliberately does not trim down the scenes, for example, how the anthropologist ‘takes a breath’ after the talk or how he struggles with certain issues that are discussed with

> Part I 59 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

the people during his time in solitude when no one is around. These kinds of moments are about being attentive and present with the camera in the right time on the right place. Koriam’s Law shows all the specificities of a particular cultural setting and fieldwork as well as filmic experiences. The closing sequence in the film is the view on the ocean and two boats moving apart as if they would indicate two different worlds, two different histories, two different sets of concepts which are not supposed to merge but somehow coexist and intermingle with each other.

Another example which I want to discuss because of its mastery editing and camerawork is David MacDougall’s film about the ‘Home for Boys’ Prayas of

Jahangirpuri in New Delhi. The ‘home’ is, as one of the boys tells us, an orphanage, an asylum for homewalas ‘orphans’, boys who got lost, and courtwalas, those who committed a crime and were brought in by police. Prior to the opening sequence – dawn in a busy street of Jahangirpuri – we find ourselves in a soundscape of voices with the quote from Mahatma Gandhi telling us about the necessity of listening to the world, and to its ‘ignorant children’ in particular. The film, Gandhi’s Children (2008) is an exceptional three hours long filmic art-work.

From the beginning we are placed inside the gates of Prayas and we situate ourselves as if we were one of the boys. The look of the camera seems to be equated with the look of a boy. The editing is in many ways different to the editing in Koriam’s Law and works as assembly of everyday issues that boys are faced with. This does not mean that we follow a linear time-line, but rather that we are slowly introduced to Prayas’ places, the relationships between the boys, and those between the social workers and the boys. Gandhi’s Children is a fieldwork film, a film which does its own fieldwork while being shot. As such, it provides a viewer with many issues, which would not appear in an ordinary documentary. Each

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assembled part starts with the awakening of the nearby surroundings and the boys in their dormitory rooms. This is followed by the daily morning routine: bathing, making beds and cleaning the rooms, doing exercises and prayers, and having breakfast. MacDougall shows us a certain discipline to which the boys are expected to get attuned. In a conversation with the filmmaker, one of the boys says that he did not like to be there at the beginning, but later on realised that they eat regularly on time, can learn to read and write, are not short of clothes or shoes, and can play as much as they like.

As I mentioned earlier in regard to any kind of long-term engagement, one gets a feeling of intimacy and shared trust between the filmmaker and the boys. This, in my view, is one of the most important issues in ethnographic filmmaking, something that cannot be bought or achieved over a short period of time, something that requires sincerity on both sides. Once the filmmaker accommodates him/herself in the filming environment, one wakes up with the people, eats with them, baths with them, and then unsurprisingly follows only a few of them. The filmmaker stays with the filmed people for months. The actual filming is an outcome of gradually developing contacts with them and successful arrangements with the institutions, which in many cases, including Gandhi’s

Children, need to give permission for filming. One is not just a casual visitor. We can see this very clearly in MacDougall’s engagement with the boys. We can talk about observational, responsive, and also participatory camera modes being implemented while filming. There is, in the film, a sequence when one of the youngest boys gets sick. In reality, though not explicitly shown, it was the cameraperson who requested the Prayas doctor to come and check the boy

(MacDougall pers. comm.). The older boys would rather scold him. They would say

> Part I 61 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

that he got skinny and sick and weak because he does not bath properly or because he constantly resists everything. While watching the film one would feel that the filmmaker never sleeps. To the contrary, he is always alert.

One of the sequences starts very early, before dawn. We, the spectators, see the empty hall and hear a boy crying for his father and mother. Once the sun has risen, we sit with the boy and talk to him. It is again the filmmaker and his student- assistant, Siddhartha Kumar, who try to comfort the boy (MacDougall pers. comm.). We develop a relationship with the boys through the camera approach.

We are faced with a harsh reality of children struggling for their freedom, not knowing many things about life yet, but being experienced enough to fight for their own rights. They are extremely strong and, as children, weak and vulnerable at the same time. Throughout the many conversations with the boys, we learn that friendship should last for life, that in fact it is God who will decide what will happen at the end, and that Delhi is never short of places to sleep and opportunities to earn money. The density of social interactions in India is shown through this home for boys and the experiences upon which they reflect. The filmmaker sometimes clearly and sometimes indirectly addresses issues of religion, wrong-doings of police, disposal of rubbish, or child labour. The film is a sensitive but unsentimental depiction of boys’ lives in Prayas, wrote Stephanie Anne Spray in her review of

Gandhi’s Children (2011). The point of the film, she states:

is that the complexity of the boys’ lives within the shelter – and the world at

large – can only be outlined, their cinematic images mere shadows of their

flesh-and-blood selves, which exceed any rendering. Gandhi’s Children is

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then true to the unfinished courses of their lives, illustrating that many

questions for them remained unanswered (Spray 2011: 762).

In the closing sequence of the film we see the happiness of one of the boys who will return to his actual home. The final shots are close-ups of a boy’s face and the hands holding the fence on a Prayas window. In slow motion a hand fades away – the boys stay behind the gate. We return to the soundscape of surroundings similar to the beginning of the film. The sound is similar but the feelings are not. Some children may never return to their real homes. They may never find a new home.

Prayas, however, will give them enough strength and discipline to go on and maybe later on establish their own homes, which will be better than the ones they had.

Both films, Koriam’s Law and Gandhi’s Children, regardless of their different filmic styles and topics, urge us to engage with the world of human thoughts, feelings and doings. They advocate the need for trust and humility. They mediate this through their looking, framing, editing, and the filmed people. We – the viewers – learn not only about socio-cultural particularities in people’s practices and concepts, but we also learn about the ethnographic filmmaking. In his philosophical discourse about tacit knowing, Michael Polanyi, wrote: “Men need a purpose which bears on eternity. Truth does that; our ideals do it” (2009 [1966]: 92). These words seem to be relevant for the people in Pomio as well as the orphan children in

Jahangirpuri and they also justify the need for films like Koriam’s Law and Gandhi’s

Children.

> Part I 63 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Camera as Catalyst

The role of cameras have always included those of a participant and observer, as well as those of a collector and catalyst, as the two discussed films demonstrate.

While the camera in an urban, mechanized world may be perceived as a technological device, as a commodity produced for consumption, and as something to be disposed and replaced, in the context of the Ambonwari village, for example, it becomes a very special thing, which "has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement" (Borgmann 2003: 31). It comes closer to a musical instrument, on which one has to learn to play, and then show his or her acquired skill to the listener. It becomes a tool for sharing of experiences, a tool of commitment to one another, and a tool for the creation of a feeling of togetherness. It becomes a link between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. The camera in this sense becomes a catalyst for many-sided experiences. In the ethnographer's hands, it calls forth a life of engagement within a particular social world.

For Jean Rouch, educated civil engineer and later anthropologist, from the 1940s until his death in 2004, the camera was an indispensable witness of social interactions and also a tool for direct communication with the filmed subjects. The films he made were like bridges built between two worlds: geographic and conceptual, cinematic and anthropological (Ten Brink 2007). Rouch compared the

‘participatory’ or ‘living camera’ of Flaherty to the ‘cine eye’ of Vertov. The invention of light-weight cameras allowed him to leave his tripod aside – he actually scolded those who continued to use it – and to take the camera on his shoulders.8 He

8 One of the camera types that virtually created the concept of the independent filmmaker in 1960s (that is a filmmaker who makes films with no connection to a mainstream studio

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praised a technique of walking with the camera, thus creating the possibility to adapt to the action in space. For him the only way to film was to improvise ‘a ballet’ in which the camera itself becomes as alive as the people it is filming (cf. Rouch

1973; quoted in Feld 2003: 38-39). It is this ‘being alive’ state of all participants, including camera, which I found important also during my stay in the Ambonwari village. It is this ‘being alive’ state that somehow brings to the surface the catalytic role of the camera in a more powerful way. It allows the cameraperson “to generate reality rather than leave it simply to unfold before the viewer” (ibid.). Without an interaction during the filming, many things would not be expressed, many things would not happen. Cinéma-Vérité, an expression that resembles Kinopravda, in other words “cinema-sincerity” (Rouch in Levin 1971: 135), has transformed the candid camera-observer into participant-observer.9 Like Robert Flaherty with the

Inuit, Jean Rouch too was sharing his filming experiences with the people he filmed, respected, cared for and loved – the Songhay-Zarma at the loop of Niger in particular (Taylor 1993). He developed a complex filming approach, combining

Flaherty’s style of ‘feedback’ and Vertov’s aspirations for representing ‘truth’

(disclosing hidden reality of the filmed subjects). His story-telling actually created and produced ‘truth’. There are two aspects of the camera in Rouch’s hands having a catalyst function: one is to make things happen because of his and the camera’s presence (Tourou and Bitti: The Drums of the Past 1971); the other is about the filmed subjects being invited to co-create the filmed story (Jaguar 1957-1967). With

production) and played an important part in the development of the Cinéma-Vérité was Éclair in 16mm film design; http://www.cinematographers.nl/CAMERAS1.html (accessed on 21.9. 2013 at 1:44 pm).

9 Both expressions, Cinéma-Vérité and Kinopravda, the first one in French and the second one in Russian literally mean ‘the cinema of truth’ or ‘cinema-truth’. Kinopravda was introduced by Dziga Vertov in the 1920s, Cinéma-Vérité by Jean Rouch in the 1960s.

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his approach, Rouch stimulated debates about the crucial issues of the filmic- ethnographic representation and the approach of an ethnographer-filmmaker.

Knowledge, as he pointed out, is the result of an endless quest where ethnographers-filmmakers and those whom they study and film, meet on a path called ‘shared anthropology’ (Feld 2003: 45-46, 101; Henley 2009: 310-337). On the one hand, this reflective and reflexive approach to filming others is important, if not necessary, considering the history of colonialism of which the anthropology is a part. On the other hand, too much self-reflexive production may bring the author more to the forefront instead of the portrayed people (Them and Me 2001). The balance between the self and the others is created not only within the frame of a film, but also – and in relation to the framed context – out of the frame. In the

Ambonwari context, I have been able to employ the camera-catalyst’s capability of eliciting individual truths, which would otherwise be kept silent and hidden. In several situations, the camera became a tool for telling the testimonies which could not be revealed to other villagers, but which the narrators wanted to be heard and seen by outsiders. The issues of ‘shared anthropology’ in these kinds of contexts are debatable and much more complex – in terms of one’s ethical, social and political decisions – than one would think when reading Rouch’s reflections. To share ethnographic accounts is therefore about sharing the truths of the participants who become more open about certain issues in their dialogues with the filmmaker than they are in their daily life (see examples below). Not everything is shown in the film, but sharing constitutes an important part of the entire filming process. The filmmaker himself/herself becomes a mediator eliciting the truths via the camera to the viewers. The majority of the filmmakers establish a friendship with their subjects, which becomes a driving force for their collaborative creation.

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Through people’s perceptions, receptions and reflections upon my doings, I began to look at my own tool of communication from a different perspective. It became a catalyst in everything I intended to do.10 First, the camera-catalyst made people think differently about the image making, my work, and it changed my own understanding of the tool I was and I am living and working with. Second, my interest in the works of other ethnographic filmmakers became clearer through this experience and through a kind of a mirror that Ambonwari people showed me.

Third, my experience of recordings gained a new dimension once I started to work with them in the editing room. A whole new world of reflections appeared in the recorded sequences about which I was not aware while recording. There was a sudden distance to the image while at the same time the filmed faces felt very present. The sense of a direct and unobtrusive interaction with the people depended not only on my lineage and clan affiliation, and my adopted kin relations with people, but also on being a ‘white-skin’ person having knowledge and control over the process of recording. Being engaged in watching and editing the footage, I found the following two sets of catalysts, positive and negative (see Table 2).

10 The word catalyst originates from Greek, where kata means ‘down’ and lyein means ‘loosen’. It is a substance that causes catalysis, in Greek katalusis, with the meaning ‘dissolve’. A catalyst induces and speeds up a reaction. It also stands for a means, channel, vehicle, method, medium, or mechanism that has the capability ‘to dissolve’. In chemistry, the reaction is called contact action. It is a process of aiding or speeding up a chemical process by a substance that does not undergo any change (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English, Hornby et al. 2005: 231). The biochemical equivalent of a catalyst is the enzyme (protein molecule). When a substance is a so-called negative catalyst, it slows down the reaction, it becomes an inhibitor.

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POSITIVE CATALYSTS

1. Daily practices / Daily recordings

> Family or individual matters: processing sago, going to garden, fishing, cooking and eating, making canoes, weaving of baskets, as well as relaxing and chewing betel nuts. Telling of life stories, commenting upon events and relationships.

> Collective practices: collecting grass for baskets and mats, sewing sago leaves for the roofing of the houses (women’s work), and also cutting grass around the local school and house building (men’s work).

2. Organized events / Camera was expected to be present

> Large scale collective events: burning of grassland when hunting wild pigs, collective fishing by poisoning the creek, cutting trees for a new garden, kurang ceremony (known as naven among the Iatmul people), public court cases and important meetings, ordinary and charismatic Catholic ceremonies, and the village Elementary School graduation ceremony.

3. Events performed for the camera

> Drama: a form of entertainment and enactment of stories. They chose to perform so called sosol nait, ‘social night’ in Tok Pisin, in the middle of the day. They put fences around a small area and enacted a disco party. Everything was played out from dress, shoes and sunglasses to paying the entrance fee, from invited guests from other villages to pretending to drink spirits, from music and dancing to arguments between drunks, from selling the food, to speeches thanking the participants for helping to collect some money, which would be used for the school fees of the organizer’s son.

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> Making of music video-clips: A particular group of young girls and some older women were chosen to dance on a playback. They wore grass skirts, painted their faces, and followed the steps on which they agreed with the main two singers and dancers, Jeffrey and Abel. A group of young men held guitars, microphones, and radios. One of the small digital cameras which I brought for the people was held by Soroni, the second cameraperson. A Sony audio-recorder was held by another young man for having an extra soundtrack available for editing. We went to a grassland in the vicinity of the village to have a bit of horizon at the back and recorded four clips.

> Recording of a ceremony organized by the Yambimbɨt villagers: The people of Yambimbɨt who live deep in the forest have no direct access to the waters. They found it hard to transport their cash crops to the town. They visited the Ambonwari village several times and asked for permission to clear the swamp and move their cash crops on Ambonwari creeks and rivers. A group of Ambonwari canoes went to the Yambimbɨt camp near Lake Virginia to grant permission. The celebration was held and I was expected to record the whole event.

> With a still camera: I was asked to photograph families, relatives, different groups, individuals, certain objects, and make portraits for identity card size photographs. Some individuals explained that it is for the next generation to see how they lived. People wanted me to take colour photographs and said that on b&w photographs they look much older and not as pretty.

NEGATIVE CATALYSTS

1. There were several individuals who did not want me to photograph their land, gardens, camps, or simply their ‘bush’. One of the reasons was apparently their resentment as they felt that they did not get sufficient attention and gifts from me and my partner; another reason lay in their strained relations with those I was filming; and some said that I should not photograph just them but others too.

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2. Once people learned that I was also recording their voices and not just the images, and that everything said in local Karawari language – such as their comments about camera, filming, and my presence – could be and actually was translated in cooperation with the village teacher, some people became more conscious about what they said and more careful when talking to me in front of the camera. This, however, was not permanent but depended on the context and the people involved.

Table 2: Positive and Negative Camera-Catalysts

Besides daily observations and recordings, which were about socializing with people and learning Ambonwari practices, and besides my interest in the lives of individual people, I was also drawn into numerous events and relationships that spread over the whole community. The camera also acted as a catalyst for showing the changes in their society when, for example, I was asked to record

‘Drama’. On the occasion of large-scale collective events, such as the kurang ceremony, I was expected to document the whole event as one of those involved in the kin relationships. In some cases, such as the burning of an area of grassland for hunting the wild pigs, the men put bilas (decoration in Tok Pisin) on their bodies for the camera, as they knew that it would look more attractive on the screen.11

11 I screened my recordings of ‘Drama’ performance, a kurang ceremony, and the burning of grassland during our night public screenings (see Chapters Five and Six). These recordings are not available on the accompanied DVD or Internet, but they can be watched on request, by sending an email to me at [email protected].

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The Filmed Subject 1

One of my closest Ambonwari friends with whom I lived in the village is my ‘sister’

Augustina Awsay. She talked endlessly about her life as a widow, about injustices befalling her because she is without a man, about recent changes in women’s lives, about her sons and daughters, and about her real and classificatory brothers and sisters. Augustina was introduced to being filmed back in 2005 when not only she, but everyone else in the village needed some time to get used to it. Two years later when I was staying in the village for a longer period of time, Augustina soon became relaxed and she considered our interviews and other filming as part of the work we had to do. The camera was no longer disturbing. More attention was directed towards me behind the camera and to the content of our conversations.

Whenever we managed to find space and time just for ourselves, she opened up and unreservedly reflected upon her life. She developed a particular way of interacting with the camera. One could say that the camera liked her. We both embarked on a long-term creative engagement, which is still going on.

When, in December 2010, I stepped on shore from the canoe and ran towards

Augustina’s house, we met on the path. We hugged each other and cried. She said: “Daniela, look, my house is not in good condition. They [another family] made ready for you a little house near the river bank. Go there. My house is a rubbish house.” Coming from a very different cultural background where friendship is based on time spent together, on shared creative engagement, and not so much on kin relations, I was surprised and said: “Augustina, you know very well that I do not mind this. I am so happy to see you. If you are washed by rain [in your rubbish house], I will be too. Don’t worry.” After a few minutes of standing on the path in front of her house, and being observed by several villagers, we moved into the

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house. During the night Augustina told me how happy she was about my arrival and added that others were simply resentful. In public she had to say what others expected from her and had to send me to the house, which others believed would be appropriate for a ‘white woman’. As a woman and a widow, Augustina could not have an important voice and I knew that giving too much attention just to her and her family could be harmful for the whole household. The entire year which I spent in the village was as intense as my arrival. I had to give my recording-attention to many other villagers, watch out for those who were prone to gossip, and keep my emotions hidden. Otherwise, very small disagreements could easily escalate into a fight. Since 2005 Augustina has known that I am working on a film about her life and family and we began to co-create the story. We had to develop a tactic to include near and distant relatives whenever they appeared at our door and wanted to join us when we went to catch fish, to gather food from the garden, or to bath in the nearby creek. There were also many situations when people came to the house just to sit with us, chew betel nuts, and talk about daily matters. They expected to be recorded too.

Over the time I developed a routine of regular visits to my and Augustina’s brothers’ houses and people began to understand that my focus was primarily on my closest family within Crocodile-1 Clan. Acknowledging my membership in this powerful clan, and noticing the strong support which I got from its members, others did not object as much as they had done before. Our ‘brothers’ Daniel and

Lawrence were the closest and the most frequent visitors to Augustina’s house.

The brother-sister relationship is the basic and the most important kin relation in

Ambonwari social organization. Daniel and Lawrence, however, had to be careful too, not to come too often to our house. People were gossiping about that they

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misused my adoption into their family and that they were mainly after my money.

They did not realise that our relationship was based on exchange. The members of my family and clan, and the two brothers in particular, asked for things and money only when they really needed them, while at the same time they were permanent providers of fresh fish, sago grubs, and other valuable foods. Besides, they were exceptional story tellers and engaged interpreters of their life-world. Lawrence was extremely happy to be able to share his experiences from his young age. We agreed to make a film about the Crocodile-1 Clan and especially of our Sapɨndam lineage and not only of Augustina’s life. Daniel was at the beginning quite suspicious of my recording. Augustina had to explain to him all over again about my intentions. Without her help, I would probably never have developed the story in the way I did. Once, Daniel confessed in front of the camera that he was scared that all his wrong doings from the past would become revealed through the camera and other villagers would see it. Many villagers felt that they should tell the truth in front of the camera and stick to what they thought were the facts when asked to tell their life stories or comment upon their work, relationships or attitudes towards a certain matter. Others, however, were cautious as they believed that you cannot hide the secrets when in front of the camera, as they would be revealed regardless of your telling them or not. This resulted in some fully opening themselves in front of the camera and others getting stiff and speechless. Those who were close to me soon realized that I did not show just everything to everyone and that I respected the confidentiality and privacy of those I recorded. I was screening the recorded footage throughout the year and together with Augustina and Lawrence, Daniel saw and understood that I did not show those things we had previously agreed to be seen only by us and the outsiders (i.e. the people from my university and the public away from the intimate environment of the village life). At the end, for Daniel

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and Lawrence, their cooperation in recording their lives was seen as their gift to me. For Augustina, it was much stronger: a bond between two sisters, and a friendship, which we both believed would never end.

The Filmed ‘Truth’

Many villagers, as well as anthropologists would say that the abandonment of customary practices such as initiation rituals and other practices connected to the spirits of the bush under the impact of the Catholic charismatic movement, not only changed the village hierarchy (taking dominant voices away from the old men), but also liberated the women (see Telban 2009, Telban and Vávrová 2010). However, as many hours of video recording of Augustina’s personal story has shown that this liberation has not been uniform, but has produced new types of inequality and rearranged the values and morality of the village. For example, because of the possibility of confessing their sins to a visiting priest, many more men and women now freely engage in sexual liaisons, the number of single mothers has increased, and many of those women who were already married with children were suddenly left alone. All these matters are not discussed openly in daily conversations or in a casual talk with an ethnographer. Even a close bond between people may not be enough for an informant to openly criticize the community for which the ecstatic worship of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit comes before everything else. It was in such a situation that the catalytic role of the camera became most apparent. It did not have the role of a priest to whom people came to confess their recent sins and to receive forgiveness. The camera did not offer any indulgences. It became an ear and an eye prepared to listen and see without criticizing, judging or gossiping. It was when Augustina and I agreed that she would talk about her lived experience in front of the camera that she saw her opportunity to tell everything that had until

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then lain on her heart. Because of the camera she decided to come out and tell her personal story straight from her wambung (the hidden ‘insideness’), that is from that place where nobody else has access to. While in a casual talk she would often have told me that it did not matter, that she did not want to talk about her suffering over many years after her husband had died, she somehow felt that sitting in front of the camera not only gave her the opportunity to tell her personal story but that it actually obliged her to tell the truth.

This ‘truth’ is about human relations in real life. The camera somehow vanishes in the discussion between the protagonist and the filmmaker and then re-enters into its role of mediator between the viewer, filmmaker, and the protagonist. Edgar

Morin wrote the following thoughts in regard to the film he made together with Jean

Rouch, Chronicle of a Summer (1960):

It is not merely a question of giving the camera the lightness of the pen that

would allow the filmmaker to mingle in the lives of people. It is at the same

time a question of making an effort to see that the subjects of the film will

recognize themselves in their own roles. We know that there is a profound

kinship between social life and the theatre, because our social personalities

are made up of roles that we have incorporated within ourselves. It is thus

possible, as in a sociodrama, to permit each person to play out his life

before the camera. And as in a sociodrama, this game has the value of

psychoanalytic truth, that is to say, precisely that which is hidden or

repressed comes to the surface in these roles, the very sap of life that we

seek everywhere and is, nonetheless, within us. More than in social drama,

this psychoanalytic truth is played for the audience, which emerges from its

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cinematographic catalepsy and awakens to a human message. It is then

that we can feel for a moment that truth is that which is hidden within us,

beneath our petrified relationships (in Feld 2003: 231-232).

The camera in many cases made the Ambonwari feel somehow ‘naked’ in front of it and provided them with a possibility to say things, which would otherwise not be said. The similar effect was reached by Morin and Rouch in the Chronicle of a

Summer, but also in previously mentioned two films Gandhi’s Children and

Koriam’s Law. The majority of interactions between the Ambonwari people, the camera, and myself were encouraging. There were, however, several cases when I and the camera were not welcome. There are several reasons for this as I have already indicated above. But the main reason, I would argue, lies in the relationships between the people in the village. There are those in the village, who because of their stinginess and greed are looked down upon by other villagers, and their complaints were somehow expected. There were also past events of which I was not aware upon my arrival and the presence of the camera simply stimulated the recurrence of old disputes, mainly between individuals. By filming a particular person, I was giving a special attention to him or her, and this was regarded as a

‘gift’ that others wanted to receive too. They wanted to exchange my gift for their gift, which was their readiness to pose for the camera and to trust me with their thoughts, feelings, and personal stories. The catalytic filming became a verbal metaphor for the path on which exchanged gifts enabled exchange of other gifts.

The camera-catalyst became a facilitator of certain events, sometimes bringing together people who would otherwise not mix. Our shared concerns were the result of the camera’s multiple functions: mediator, participant, silent companion, black- box absorbing moving images of people, their environment, and their talk. These

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concerns were shared not only through the records which I made, but mainly through mutual encounters between the camera, me and the people. The

Ambonwari concluded: “Mɨn minan wok ‘this is her work’.”12

12 See short video-clip Camera as a Catalyst which was presented several times at the conferences and workshops where I talked about the camera being a catalyst (Nordic Anthropological Film Association film festival and conference 2009; colloquium on Ethnography: Interactive Research and Reciprocity July 2010, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University; and at a Friday graduate seminar series, The Australian National University, also in July 2010.

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CHAPTER Two: Cameraperson

From Extension to Being

In my research among the Karawari-speaking Ambonwari, the camera received the central role in our relationship and was indispensable for my participation in and observation of their everyday practices. From my first arrival and appearance in the village it was perceived as a tool that was not simply an object but rather an extension of my person. Conceptually, it could not be separated from me. During my fieldwork in 2011, it received a name, Sanggwanda, and became a being on its own. It was my ‘sister’ Augustina who one day decided to give it a name. This was not unusual as large objects – motor canoes, slit-drums, outboard motors, etc. – had their own names, which made them powerful spirits of particular clans. The complexity of naming systems and the importance of names are well known characteristics of Sepik societies and many anthropologists have written about these issues (Bateson 1958 [1936], Harrison 1990, Telban 1998, Wassmann

1991). Thus, the name for the camera was carefully chosen: first, it had to belong to our Sapɨndam lineage of the Crocodile-1 Clan; second, it had to be socially appropriate (in relation to Augustina and myself); and third it had to reveal the camera’s characteristic. The name which derived from the verb sanggwa- ‘see, look’ with the female ending, thus seemed the most appropriate. As I will explain below this not only made my camera a being on its own but placed us in a particular kind of kin relationship.

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Initially, I began to ask various people how they would call the camera as a tool, as an object. In Tok Pisin people use to say bokis piksa ‘box for pictures’. In the local vernacular, however, there was no ready-at-hand alternative for a direct translation.

It took several days before I received the first answer. Julias Sungulmari, the elementary school teacher, used a descriptive sentence for a camera taking a picture: krmaimbɨna isa akwan ‘she is taking (a picture) together with camera’.

Julias was simply translating Tok Pisin kisim piksa ‘take a picture’ into Karawari.

When I asked Julias for a term that would be the best for a camera, he obviously did not want to use a word anggɨndarkwa that translates as spirit, shadow, and reflection in water or mirror, which is otherwise also a term for a photograph

(Telban 1998: 56). Following the logic of visual mimesis, he said that krmaim

‘forked holder of the roof’ could be used for both camera and taking a picture. It denoted the camera when referring to two pieces of wood crossed and tied together on the top of a roof in order to hold the sago thatch shingles (see Plate 6).

Krmaim, which protects the leaves from being blown or washed away, closely resembled my tripod. Moreover, just as krmaim was useless in itself but received its role in connection with the house, so I felt he was making a relation between me and the camera. On the other hand krmaim is also a term for an image of a crocodile, an image of something which is, when carved on the posts or different spirit-things, of great length. This latter meaning, ‘to make/take the image with something long’ was actually enough to be used in the sense of making/taking a picture with krmaim. It was the Ambonwari observation of me handling the camera and looking through the viewfinder for a long time. I was amazed by this visual basis for a verbal expression and perplexed as I felt that I had just witnessed how an existing term acquired a new meaning.

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Plate 6: Krmaim holding the horizontal sago leaves over the roof © Daniela Vávrová 2011

While many Ambonwari people were already familiar with still cameras, the bigger video camera with attached external microphone proved to be something quite exceptional. People were not indifferent to filming. Their reactions, however, were not the same. Some were fully relaxed calling me to come closer; others were embarrassed. This was especially the case when I was filming daily events and the shots were long. People liked to dress up in good clothes, put sunglasses, hand- watch, hats, and ideally chew a betel nut when photographed, and they were ashamed when captured in situations when they thought that they did not look good. Yet others questioned the camera’s use altogether and only a few people more or less knew how it worked. When noticing that they were being filmed, most people adopted a posture as if I was making a picture with my still camera. They stood motionless in one position. On several occasions this produced comical situations for all of us. Other people wanted to be filmed all the time. They wanted to act. They wanted me to record them with the ‘big camera’ and not with the small

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still camera. They were actually disappointed if I took the ‘small camera’ on our trips. Soon people knew that photographs are stills and can be printed, enlarged, and kept for the memory. The video recording was something new and it was expected that I would show them everything I recorded over the period of time. As I write later in this chapter and in Part III, the most interesting issue for the

Ambonwari was to see oneself through the eyes of others, that is my camera view and people’s camera view. Generally, the moving images were more desired as they better resembled the real situation and actually showed the events as they happened, in people’s own words.

It was not only my approach with the camera, but also my long-term stay that made a difference for my study. First of all, my closest relatives took me as one of them

(regardless of my ‘white skin’ which was constantly mentioned). I was entrusted to keep my sister’s money or brother’s bush knife so that others would not ask for these things and take them from them. It was amazing to see how familiar one can become with another (they with me, I with them). They expressed their worries about me and about my work in a similar way that I felt about them. In the middle of my twelve months’ stay, the HDV camera’s tape deck got stuck and I had to fly to Brisbane, in

Australia, to get it repaired. A few days before my trip to Angoram, Wewak, Port

Moresby and finally Brisbane, a young village healer, Augustina’s son Jack, tried to heal the camera. He came to my house several times, asked for a betel nut or a cigarette, and was just looking at the camera. He soon concluded that the camera was not broken and it would soon work again. He said that “a man [a spirit] holds his hand over it” and once he would release his grip, the camera would regain its previous condition. The cause for its malfunction could be traced back to my stay in the village a few years earlier. It apparently happened in 2007-2008, that I unknowingly captured

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not only saki ‘bush spirit’, but imɨnggan saki ‘the spirit of the village’, whose name and image should not be revealed, especially to women and children, with my camera. It was one of my ‘fathers’ who told me about this when the camera got ‘sick’ and I pursued the issue further. He said that the spirit of the village came by, while I was recording something and by pure coincidence I recorded him as well. In the past it was only initiated men who could have contact with the spirit. Women were under strict prohibition of mentioning his existence and seeing him could cause death and destruction. Nowadays, after many years of Catholic education, fifteen years of the intensive Catholic charismatic movement, and the recent preoccupation with the rubber business, one would not expect a sudden turn in the direction of the deepest issues of their old customary life. Being a woman in a male dominated society, handling such an object of power as the camera, and being capable of capturing an otherwise invisible being, I directly interfered with issues that once belonged to a purely male world of knowledge, secrecy and power.

Cameras as well as other new technologies like mobile phones, GPS, and computers have for the Ambonwari special capabilities like they do for the people of New Britain as already mentioned in connection with the movie Koriam’s Law. Women, on the one hand, are simply not allowed to possess that kind of knowledge and should not interfere with the powers, which could harm their families. On the other hand, I am a

‘white-skin’ woman and I have, as a woman who in people’s view most probably has connection with the world of the dead, certain knowledge and privileges. I was nevertheless shown that there are things which I should not know, record, and talk about. Regardless of all the Christian teachings, people continue to fear the spirit of the village, who is the spirit of the land on which the settlement is erected. Talking about him would be equated with calling his name and calling one’s name means bringing

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one into existence. The same ‘father’, who told me about my recording of the spirit, also said that if they suddenly started to beat the slit-drum in the way they did in the past, the spirits would wake up and come forward. It is a matter of keeping the spirits at a distance and by diminishing their power. Their living realm is generally invisible and one has to be attentive to different signs, which announce the presence of the underground beings. Jack, the young healer, called me to his house the night before I was leaving the village to take the camera for repair in Australia. We sat and talked about what I had seen and recorded. “Was there anything strange or bad?” he asked. I mentioned my recordings of several disputes and very personal interviews that I remembered, but he did not find anything wrong in all this. He further explained that even if I had captured the spirit I would have not been aware of it. After my return from

Brisbane, a few weeks later, I sat with Jack again and talked about the spirit of the village. I asked him if there was a need to talk to the spirit and explain my doings as I was supposed to stay in the village for the next six months. Our conversation went as follows.

Jack: Now, when only two of us are sitting here [and nobody else], I will tell you.

On the day when you wanted to take pictures… We used to say: the big man of the village, imɨnggan saki [spirit of the village], is here… he is here. When you think of building the tower [from which I intended to record] you should not walk around and talk about it. You choose the men [who will build it] very carefully, all right? Or you tell me, “Jack you will ask this and that young man, like Jeffrey, Abel, Theo… you will ask them.” O. K. We will build the tower. [You should do it] in this kind of way.13

13 Conversation with Jack was filmed on 25 July 2011 in Tok Pisin and translated by me in 2012.

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Daniela: If I talk a lot around, he will...

Jack: He will be here. He will be here because, you know, in the past he was here but he was hiding. When we abandoned our custom, I am just saying that we abandoned custom [because it is still here], he is now living at the open place. Once we make a mistake, he immediately comes. So... when the men are preparing things [for building the tower]... you know, you are a woman. If Kapraymari [Borut Telban] used it [camera] nothing would happen. He is a man. But you are a woman. You know, you have the village name. You hold the name of the Crocodile [clan], the name of [my] mother, that’s a big thing. You two are like the people of the place.

Daniela: I was told that if it [camera] gets the name, it becomes like [a being]...

Jack: Yes. It also has its name. That’s what I am saying. It [camera] has its name

Sanggwanda. Also Francis has it [Francis’ firstborn daughter is called Sanggwanda], you can judge it. Francis also has the story of the ancestors [and he is like other men from the Crocodile-1 clan the owner of the name Sanggwanda]. He knows about the ancestral singing and dancing, and he also knows about the singing and dancing of the men’s house. And so the camera also has its name [revealing its relationships to people and spirits].

Daniela: So, should we do something, like put a branch of betel nuts somewhere or say something in a quiet way or something else [to communicate with and please the spirit of the village]?

Jack: When we want to build the tower we can inform mother’s brother Samuel, and

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other men who know ancestral stories... Francis. You can go and see these two men.

Forget about all these young men who do not know any of the ancestral stories. The big men too, they don’t know ancestral stories, they will say: “We didn’t see custom”.

Daniela: I will go and talk to the two men about recording or not recording.

Jack: Mother’s brothers Samuel and Francis, you can ask the two about it. If you want to take pictures now, you can take them. It’s nothing. It was timing and talking that went wrong. We got straight into his [spirit’s] timing when we wanted to build the tower. So, after one week we will go to visit the working men. Because he is the father of the village, we say that he is imɨnggan saki. Even when he stays far away he nevertheless comes back to check the village. He comes to see how it is [how we live]. If mother’s brother Samuel talks [tells the spirit about the camera], he [the spirit of the village] understands it. He will not do anything to the camera. The camera will not break down.

If he puts his hand on it then the camera will break down.

All of my video cameras received proper names. In a similar way that the

Ambonwari approached me, the ‘white woman’, they also approached my cameras.

Thus, from this perspective, the camera as a being has skin, eyes and ears. It has internal organs and memory. It can or cannot be healed. Together with me it does things, has its own intentions, and influences relationships. According to the names given to them, my cameras got into a culturally specific relation first with me and then with the other villagers and then with the dead ones too. The cameras were not just my extensions anymore as was the case before, but became beings in themselves with their own specific kin relationships. All my cameras became my yimarinji, my brothers’ daughters (see Figure 1).

> Part I 85 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Figure 1: Aki (FZ) and yimari (BD) relationship; The kin terms (Ego = I, Daniela) within Sapɨndam lineage (anay = F, BS, FBSS; asay = M; masɨn = B, BSS, FBS; masɨnmɨnanma yarma = BW, FBSW; kupanma = older Z; wasanarma = Z; Aki = FZ; yimari = BD, FBSD). The types of cameras and audio recorder and their names are placed under their namesakes.

> Part I 86 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Before explaining the relationship between yimari (BD) and aki (FZ), that is between my camera and myself, let me mention some general specificities of

Ambonwari ‘Omaha’ kinship system as it pertains to women. On marriage, a woman leaves her patriline to live with her husband and her children belong to another lineage and clan. Therefore, mother and daughter do not belong to the same lineage and clan and a daughter cannot receive her name from the set of names of her mother’s lineage. Following patrilineal descent and periodicity of two generations, which ‘replace’ each other alternatively (Telban 1998: 110) women receive the names of their father’s father’s sisters. By having the same name the two women are in many contexts identified as one and the same person. Women cannot bear the names of their father’s sisters. However, although the kinship and naming systems emphasise duality of adjacent generations, generational difference can also be made to disappear (ibid.: 115). In such a situation, when a collapse of generations takes place, all the men of a patriline become equated and all the women of a patriline become ‘sisters’ regardless of a generational gap. Let us see how this works in a specific kind of kin relationship into which I and my cameras were brought.

The yimari (BD) and aki (FZ) relationship is characteristic only for women. The men do not use the term yimari at all. Aki cares for yimari and vice versa. Both are from the same lineage and the same clan. Both leave their lineage and their clan when married to live with another clan (their husband’s). As the brother-sister relationship is one of the most important in the kinship system among the Ambonwari, aki takes up the role of both father and father’s sister of her brother’s daughter (as you can see in Figure 1). Just as away (MB) is ‘male mother’ aki (FZ) is ‘female father’. As a

> Part I 87 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

woman, she can advise and help her yimari in everything that pertains to women. If yimari does something big, completes a higher grade in education, for example, aki takes up the role of her brother, her yimari’s father. She dresses up as a man, takes a spear into her hands, and celebrates her ‘daughter’s achievement (kurang ceremony). When taking up the father’s role, she provides a fatherly support – often lacking from the real father – that continues after the marriage of her brother’s daughter. The reason for this is that a man gets into a taboo relationship (masok,

WF) with his daughter’s husband (apuk, DH), which also blocks the close relationship between a father and his married daughter (see Telban 1998: 133-

136). If my cameras were either my ‘sons’ or my ‘daughters’ they would, from a perspective of a married woman in a patrilineal society, belong to another lineage and to another clan.

Aki and yimari can also exchange the terms of reference so that aki becomes yimari and yimari becomes aki. From the perspective of the collapsing of generations, characteristic to the Ambonwari ‘Omaha’ kinship system, a father can call his son a father (patrilineal grandfather and grandson can have same names and can marry women with the same names from the same lineage and clan so that a man sees the same person in his father and his son). His daughter therefore becomes aki, father’s sister. Father’s sister follows the terminology of her brother and also calls her brother’s son anay, father, and her brother’s daughter aki, father’s sister. In such a situation a woman who is in everyday life called aki (FZ) becomes yimari (BD). This leads to a conclusion that whenever the collapse of generations takes place, aki (FZ) and yimari (BD) become one and the same person. Looking from this perspective, my cameras were equated with me.

> Part I 88 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

I is Another14

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze discusses film and cinema in two volumes. He has created many new concepts or images of thought in the intersection of philosophy and cinematography. In the first volume he writes about the movement-image. For him, the movement-image is a conjunction of still images creating a larger sensory- motor image which is a spatial extension composed of perception-image and action-image (Deleuze 2008 [1983]). There is also affection-image, the third variety, and for Deleuze it is a necessary given of the image (2008 [1983]: 67-68).

For him the affection-image is the missing link in the cinematic creation of the image. “Deleuzian cinematic philosophy is not a theory of spectatorship”, argues

Laura Marks in her book The Skin of the Film (2000: 150). “To talk about the states, histories, and circumstances of the individual people experiencing cinema, we need a phenomenology of individual experience” (ibid.). Deleuze was primarily writing about European and American feature films. David Martin-Jones (2011) deterritorializes Deleuze’s philosophical work on cinema and looks at different productions around the world. The “major challenge to Deleuze’s anthropocentric notion of cinema”, Martin-Jones says, “may well lie in the different kinds of time and space now made possible by new digital media” (2011: 237).

In the second book on cinema under the notion of time-image, Deleuze examines the story of the film [récit] and its veracity as well as the issue of becoming the other. For him, the filmic truth “finds its full expression, not in the sensory-motor connection, but in the ‘adequation’ of the subject and the object”; the story is

14 The subtitle refers to Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Je est un autre (in Deleuze 2005 [1985]: 148).

> Part I 89 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

therefore about “the development of two kinds of images, objective and subjective, their complex relation which can go as far as antagonism, but which ought to find resolution in an identity of the type Ego = Ego; identity of the character seen and who sees, but equally well, the identity of the camera/film-maker who sees the character and is what the character sees” (Deleuze 2005 [1985]: 142-143).

Deleuze gives an example of Pasolini’s ‘cinema of poetry’, where the camera acquires an internal vision, a kind of simulation of or mimesis with the character’s way of seeing (Ego = Ego). What he wants to emphasize in Pasolini’s films, is that the conventional belief of the camera seeing objectively and a character subjectively, is not an issue anymore. It absolutely vanishes. It is also not a question anymore, whether the camera has an active effect on situations and whether people are filmed or not. At this point, Deleuze comes to Jean Rouch and the transformation of characters in his story-telling. The characters whom Rouch portrayed had become the story-tellers themselves. The camera does not mark fictional or real, past or present, but it constantly reattaches to before and after.

Both the filmmaker and his characters make their own stories visible. This transformative aspect also dwells on the fact that for Jean Rouch, it was a matter of getting out of his dominant culture and reaching the premises of another identity

(see Deleuze 2005 [1985]: 147). To become ‘another’, as the title of one of Rouch’s films ‘Me, a Black’ (Moi, un Noir, 1958) clearly indicates, tells us that to live one’s own creation, and to love and care for the people we film, means to become a part of their lived experience. For Rouch as he explained, Moi, un Noir made with

Oumarou Ganda, was the result of an encounter of two people, a kind of discovery of each other, and also a poetic revolution in filmmaking and representing the

‘other’ (in Feld 2003: 139-140).15

15 See also the film Cabascabo, made by Oumarou Ganda in 1968, about his life preceding

> Part I 90 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

I can say that these words echo my own feelings, which I experienced with the

Ambonwari people whom I filmed. The filmmaker becomes part of the other, of the filmed character, and the other becomes part of the filmmaker. In this way, Deleuze says, Ego = Ego is actually a degenerate form of them = them (2005 [1985]: 147).

This means that the filmmaker and the character become simultaneously others through the filming process and are both creators of ‘the truth’. Each of them embodies something of the other. Together, they create a story [récit] and the camera becomes a transmitter of two related poles. Instead of equation as Deleuze wrote, I would rather say: one and the other, or one with the other and the other with the one, are engaged in creation. The equation exists only when there is a difference. For example: Who am I, an ethnographer or a filmmaker? Am I a dead person who has returned to her ‘home’ in PNG, a spirit visiting the Ambonwari village with or in a form of a camera? Am I a small tiny frog or Truffaut’s young actor from The 400 Blows (1959) whose image I pinned on the wall of my village house? The Ambonwari ascribed all these appearances to me and in a similar way

I could easily look at different appearances of many Ambonwari individuals.

Moi, un Noir; and the writings on this theme: Whose Voice? Whose Film?: Jean Rouch, Oumarou Ganda and Moi, un Noir (Ungar 2007: 111-123); Dreams of Black and White (Henley 2009: 82-100).

> Part I 91 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Plate 7: Sanggwanda, my Sony HDV camcorder, Plate 8: The frog, yarakmay, with no when ‘sick’. bum but only bones, the skinny one.

Plate 9: Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959): An older woman, told me that the Holy Spirit appears to her exactly like the person on this image. Augustina’s daughter’s baby-son first pointed at the picture and then to me, absolutely sure we are one and the same person. An older man said: ”The person is not you, but looks very much like you.”

The veracity of an image and its relation to one’s personality, the seeing and being seen, is and it will continue to be an open-ended discourse. Vivian Sobchack writes about the embodied relation between the filmmaker-camera (I/eye) and spectator- projector (in my case Ambonwari/eye) that “[t]ogether, they constitute a common eye” (1992: 202). This does not mean that they are one and the same ‘eye’, but this common eye and subjectivity are “located and identified in reflection precisely

> Part I 92 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

as an existential eye... It is in the imbricated and existential conjunction of these two embodiment relations and two modalities of the viewing-view/viewed-view that a hermeneutic relation emerges, and that a dialectic of perception and expression comes into being as the dynamic complexity” of seeing and being seen (ibid. 1992:

202-203).16

The Filmed Subject 2

Another close Ambonwari friend, beside Augustina, with whom I developed a recording relationship is Alexia Wakarimay. She is a rather silent woman with a gentle appearance but a tough gaze. Like Augustina, she is also my ‘sister’ although from another branch of the same lineage of our Crocodile-1 Clan. While she was much more concerned about what to say and how to say it than

Augustina, she was eager to show me around and take me to the places where she does her daily work: collecting grass and making baskets and mats, fishing, processing sago, and so on. She was an interesting person to follow and I learned from her about the daily practices of women. Her last-born daughter, Enet Yapai, could not be separated from me. The attraction was mutual. She was always curious and interested in filming and my other preoccupations. The difference of these three characters, Augustina, Alexia, and Enet, is evident in their talking, silent moments, in the ways they do their work, in their body language, and in their interactions with others. Like Augustina, Alexia and Enet were also introduced to the camera in 2005. In contrast to Augustina’s relaxed engagement with filming,

16 The film reveals the truth as much as it disguises it, wrote Edgar Morin, the sociologist cooperating with Jean Rouch. “Our masks (in other words our faces), the parts we play (in other words our utterances) enable us to express ourselves at the same time as to disguise ourselves. Truth is not a Holy Grail to be won: it is a shuttle which moves ceaselessly between the observer and the observed, between science and reality” (Morin 1962: 5).

> Part I 93 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Alexia was mainly concentrating on her own work, never fully losing her awareness of the camera. Her movements were silent and very precise. She often asked me if

I had recorded what I wanted, and whether there was something else that she would need to do. Whenever I had too many things to do at once and was losing the thread, Alexia’s warm approach and our affectionate relationship proved extremely important for me. She, as well as Augustina, liked asking me questions about women’s lives in ‘my world’. Little Enet got used to the camera very fast. We became good friends in 2005 when she was six years old. Every time when she came to see me she brought me a big flower. She threw it on me and wanted to play. In people’s view this was an expression of love; in my view it was an extraordinary beginning of a new friendship. She almost did not talk, and I did not talk either. Our communication was non-verbal, and it seemed that only flowers spoke for us. When I returned to the village in 2007 our interaction radically changed. In two years she had grown up and besides the vernacular, which she spoke before, she had become fluent also in Tok Pisin. It was similar with me. I mastered Tok Pisin and even learned many Karawari words which were constantly used in our daily communication. It became obvious that she had already embodied certain culturally specific ways of talking and doing things and had a group of peers with whom she spent more time than before. Her interactions with me and the camera were spontaneous and were conducted with ease. Her curiosity and wish to learn about filming and photographing brought us even closer.

In 2011 the situation was different again and because of the jealousy of other villagers we were much more constrained when and where we went together.

Nevertheless, as with Augustina, and also Alexia, Enet and I not only deepened our relationship, but we also accomplished many tasks in recordings and discussions. Enet became an active partner in the photographic and filmic creation

> Part I 94 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

with her own camera, which I had brought to her (see video-clip Dialogic Recording with the Ambonwari and Chapter Six).

David MacDougall wrote, “[a]t every moment the filmmaker’s vision is defined and constituted in relation to its surroundings” (1998: 30). Anthropologists-filmmakers portraying people’s lives develop complex relationships with their subjects involving closeness and distance at the same time. We enter a new horizon of sharing a common space and time with our hosts from whom we are destined to depart.

“Filmmaking provides a strange and intensive mode of access to the world, both more immersed and more detached” (MacDougall 2006: 91). When I was about to leave the village in 2005, Enet asked her mother why I was leaving when I had just arrived. In 2008, when I and our canoe were getting ready to depart from the village, there was no crying or hugging between me and Enet, but her last look into the camera said everything. She turned away and left the frame. Camera and I, we suddenly felt empty. In 2011, Alexia and Enet came to see me at night, they did not come in the morning when I was departing. A short portrait of Enet, which I made in

2008, was my first attempt to express how the camera could become an elucidator in seeing the world, enrich ethnographic fieldwork, and provide new material for anthropological debates.17 The child’s curiosity, ease and honesty were rewarding elements in our relationship as well as in recording and photographing. They became the main indications for further editing and for my personal research. This

17 This short experimental portrait was made as a part of my M.A. Thesis (Vávrová 2008). See Part III for discussion about watching the film with Enet and her closest relatives. The film was produced by The Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana. It can be ordered from Royal Anthropological Institute, Great Britain; http://www.therai.org.uk/fs/film-sales/enet-yapai-an- ambonwari-girl/

> Part I 95 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

was achievable only because of a longer period of time spent with Enet and her relatives, and my frequent returns to the village. My adopted kinship position enabled me to participate in particular situations and to find suitable ‘unprivileged’ angles for my camera. Enet’s interest and openness were exactly what the camera was searching for. The roles of the observer and the observed were often exchanged. My vision had been transformed through filming. It became more

Ambonwari than I could have ever dreamed about. Watching and editing the footage brings me back to the village. The filmed moments are continually re-lived.

Paraphrasing Deleuze and thinking of my recordings, I can say that while Ego gets separated from Ego by departure, they remain equated in the film. It is this filmic equation stored on the tape (in celluloid form before, and as digital cards nowadays), and not some kind of romantic nostalgia on my part or subsequent reflection, which keeps the observer and observed together.

Plate 10: Enet Yapai and her ‘father’, brother’s son © Daniela Vávrová 2011

> Part I 96 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Camera in the Hands of the Ambonwari

After several years of experimenting with my cameras, and questioning the

Ambonwari about seeing and hearing, I decided to bring small digital cameras to the village and carry out a kind of collaborative audio-visual project. The chosen individuals were novices to handling a camera, but they learned to operate it very fast. On the audio-visual material of their first recordings, one can hear clicking of buttons when they tried to figure out how the camera worked and what all those buttons were for. Often, without me telling them, they proudly showed me how to change the batteries or how to watch what they had just recorded. With digital cameras, reflecting upon the recordings was immediate and instant. They soon learned how to delete those images and recordings, which they did not like or did not want me to see. There were two Panasonic Lumix photographic cameras with a filming mode and one video camera Sanyo Xacti with the possibility of still shots.

All three were shock- and water-proof. From the beginning of my fieldwork, I had a plan of whom I would entrust the cameras. One Panasonic was given to

Augustina’s son to help me with documenting the everyday life of their family. The

Sanyo camera I decided to give to Enet and the second Panasonic I planned to make available to other villagers. During the first months of my stay in the village I provided only the two Panasonic cameras and waited for the right time to give the

Sanyo to Enet. I wanted her first to get familiar with the recording process by using one of Panasonic cameras. It seemed to be the right decision. It was very difficult to organize a kind of a workshop as the chosen individuals were from different clans and mainly spent time in their own area. They were also of different age and gender and I did not want to embarrass them if they, in the process of learning, had been caught in their ignorance. Therefore, I decided to provide individual instructions. From time to time I directed a person to capture something I was

> Part I 97 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

interested in, but there was always much more to record and to show for the

Ambonwari. I reacted spontaneously according to the free time and will of those who wanted to learn more about the cameras. It soon became apparent that the social dimensions of, and troubles with recording were often more important than the image-making itself.

The Karawari saying amangok ‘me too’ captures well the whole situation around the first months of recording. Regardless of several cameras being constantly in circulation, it was impossible to satisfy all those who would like to test them. ‘A father/mother of a thing’ or an appointed carer was needed, otherwise a camera would be ‘torn apart’ by all the others. Everyone had to try a new thing. Everyone had to put hands on it. I soon realised that ‘a father/mother of a thing’ does not actually use it, but gives it away to be used by others. The collective mode of existence based on egalitarianism and equality in people’s access to things and doings justified the amangok ‘me too’ attitude and was reflected in recorded topics as well. Over the months, climbing betel nut palms and chewing betel nuts, posing and dancing with radios, finding an egg of a wild fowl, collecting sago grubs, and paddling in canoes became the most recorded topics. The hours of people’s recorded material were rapidly accumulating. The shots were usually very short and often shaky because of a lack of experience and the enthusiasm with which the cameras were held. Later on, however, those who handled the cameras more often learned about the steady shots and the need for longer sequences. Once the cards in the cameras were full, I downloaded the images and videos to my computer or external hard drive and charged the camera’s batteries. People were very enthusiastic and proud to see their recordings on the screen and they learned about many technicalities while watching their own footage.

> Part I 98 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

By giving the cameras to different people, I also managed to balance resentment and people’s suspicion about my choice of the favourite camera characters. One could not simply work with a few people. One had to recognize and respect the deep meaning of the culturally accepted expression amangok ‘me too’ and try to avoid resentment, anger and mean behaviour that could result from neglecting such a person. I soon understood that there should be at least a few people doing the same thing, never only one person. Usually, the initial enthusiasm soon died out. Only those who were truly interested and managed to hold on to the camera, regardless of others asking for it, did a consistent amount of work and actually started to be respected for their skill of handling the camera by other villagers. The image-making was accompanied by big excitement. There was a feeling of prestige, especially in comparison to other villages, as it was expected that the

‘outside world’ would watch their images. The most obvious value in making and watching recordings and photographs was relationships, which had been, were, and could be established. The images were made for, and addressed to, the

‘outside world’ of which I was the representative. I was often told that people in

Europe would surely be enthusiastic about watching the recordings from the village. This conclusion was based on people’s own experiences when we had public village screenings (Chapters Five and Six). The visual depictions of the

‘outside world’ in magazines and books, were in great demand to be seen and to get to know the places and people who lived elsewhere (in Tok Pisin luk save, knowing by seeing). But the people wanted more. In everything they did they wanted to build up a link between their world and the world seen on paper or screen. They wanted to look behind the surface skin of the image. Thus, the images Ambonwari made and addressed to the ‘outside world’ were actually a kind

> Part I 99 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

of gift, an invitation, which required some kind of tangible response. By providing images of themselves they actually participated in a process of bringing the desired external world closer to them (see video-clip Ambonwari Recordings 01).

Giving the cameras to the people eventually opened up a new issue which was about ‘looking back’ or ‘returning look’ of the Ambonwari to my camera-gaze. They could equally look through the viewfinder and capture whatever they wanted. They could look at me while I was recording and they could discover all the tricks of framing and zooming in and out when choosing the subjects of recording. In short, they experienced what I was doing over the years when living in the village. The whole issue of sharing ‘the look’, knowledge, and experiences constituted an important change in our relationship. People became acquainted with the skill of using the tool, and did not just learn about it through the words or images in books and magazines. They suddenly realized that it was not unimportant how one handled the camera, and that one needed to learn the skill of how to use it just as one needed to learn how to use the tools for making a canoe. They also soon realized that what was once deleted could not be restored anymore. This was sometimes frustrating for both me and the Ambonwari. The cameras were used mainly by children, teenagers, and men who were in their 30s and 40s. The older parents and elders simply did not get an opportunity to handle them. One of the central principles of Ambonwari sociality is that everything goes to children, beginning with the entire plate of food. There were, however, occasions at night, or on a trip, when the parents took the camera from their children and tried to work with it. They usually said that they were too old to learn how to use it and did not do a good job. It is not for them, they said, but for their children to learn about new technologies. I never saw an older person handle the camera, but I got some

> Part I 100 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

recordings and photographs made by them when the kids brought the cameras to change the card or batteries and we watched together what they had done.

Parents, siblings, and peers were the most recorded characters. Moreover, parents loved to be present on the screen, explaining what they were doing: collecting food or tobacco from their gardens, fishing, cutting trees, collecting sago grabs, processing sago, cooking sago porridge, making a canoe or building a camp- house. It was always a particular area, depending on clan membership and kin relations, that the Ambonwari camerapersons went to and socialized in. There were many varieties of shots, mainly from their gardens, paths on which they walk on their way to process sago, swimming places and places they catch fish. When they went to the neighbouring villages, the camera had to go with them too.

Thinking of MacDougall’s different approaches in handling the cameras, it was the observational camera together with the interactive one that dominated in people’s recordings. When looking at some examples one can see that the characters in front of the camera dominated those behind it (see video-clip Ambonwari

Recordings 02).

A particular issue in their recordings was talking to the camera. Those recorded were often told: “Mi mariawkusira, karisimbin ‘you talk, strong!’” For the Ambonwari, this became an important difference between still and moving-picture camera’s function. Once, when I was discussing this with Bapra Simi I was told: “The moving pictures are powerful. We see actual people moving and talking. When we see a still photograph, we do not know where the person is and what they do. They do not talk to us. Like the picture of Isidor in a newspaper. There was also written a story with the picture, and so we knew where he was. If there was no written story with it, we would not know it”. As I have already mentioned, the video camera was

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generally much more desired than the photographic camera. It was something new and it enabled immediate watching of moving pictures. Moreover, it was a direct reflection upon the actual and everyday life of the villagers.18

Plate 11: Jeffrey with his mobile phone, Ambonwari village © Daniela Vávrová 2011

One of the very talented young men whose work I want to present here is Jeffrey

Donald better known under his nickname Captain. He is the firstborn son of my namesake Sapet. Augustina and I are also his ‘mothers’. Jack (Augustina’s firstborn son), Jeffrey, and some other young Ambonwari men left the village in

1998. They dreamt of becoming musicians and recording their own music CD

(Vávrová 2008). This, however, never happened. They first travelled around PNG and then settled in Lae, where they co-created their own settlement, today called

18 In some cases, when people thought of quick access to the images and wanted visual memories for future generations, I was asked to make photographs and not to film. I was told that I should enlarge those photographs and send them back to the village.

> Part I 102 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Ambonwari 2. After I visited them in Lae in 2008, I received a letter from Jeffrey asking me for a video-camera with which he would like to make music video-clips.

When I returned to Ambonwari in 2011, Jeffrey was already there. He was pleasantly surprised that the letter had actually reached me, that I remembered him, and that I brought several cameras for the people. The young men, who after many years returned from town, including Jeffrey, were seen by other villagers to be experienced and gifted in certain knowledge that others in the village did not have. Interestingly enough this knowledge included both capabilities to make use of customary practices, enriched by experiences gained abroad and the powers provided by the Holy Spirit. Jeffrey and Jack were in the last group of novices who were initiated in the Ambonwari men’s house in 1994, and they both became healers. Shortly after their return to the village they were in demand to heal people and share their experiences and knowledge. This created resentment from other young men, who suddenly felt insignificant. Some, especially those who rejected all customary practices and professed to be experts in healing with the help of God and the Holy Spirit, started to gossip about them. In the case of Jeffrey using the camera, however, no one objected as he had already learned how to use it while living in town. He was nevertheless cautious in his doings as he wished to keep away from trouble. Like many other Ambonwari, who tried to avoid daily tensions and arguments, Jeffrey spent most of his time in the bush-camp of his consanguineal away ‘mother’s brother’, Samuel.19

19 Previously mentioned relationship between aki (FZ) and yimari (BD) is mirrored in one of the most important relationships in the Sepik River area, the one between mother’s brother and sister’s son (Bateson 1958 [1936]). In Ambonwari, the two are called away (MB) and maypɨnggɨnar (ZS). The latter can also be called wasan ‘son’, especially during initiation ritual and kurang ceremony when the maternal uncle, away, identifies with his sister and becomes the boy’s ‘male mother’ (see Telban 1998: 132).

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Being able to spend his time in a nearby camp suited both Jeffrey’s character and the momentary situation in the village.

Besides being a healer, Jeffrey was first of all a musician. He was different to other young men because of his talent and compassion. I saw him often playing with his mobile phone or small laptop-like digital device with an audio-visual game created as a Chinese-English dictionary. Both devices were primarily used to watch music video-clips and listen to the music. He was very much attuned to new technologies and I knew from the beginning that one of my Panasonic Lumix cameras would be given to him. In contrast to other camera users, Jeffrey preferred to take photographs and was rarely making videos. Why did he like photography more than video? The reasons were several. First of all, Jeffrey was aware that one could not charge the batteries in the bush as easily as in a town. Therefore, he tried to keep the camera working for as long as possible. He was, on the other hand, constantly re-watching the photographs he made with his relatives. In fact, I soon realized that the battery was mainly used up for re-watching the images, and not so much for photographing or recording. He was also embarrassed to come too often to see me and ask me to recharge the couple of batteries I had for each of the cameras. Now and then, he sent someone else with the request to change the battery. Jeffrey wanted to have a working camera in his hands all the time. He wanted to be ready for anything that suddenly appeared in front of his eyes. The still images, as he said, “kept the moment, whereas the video let it go”. He disliked the young men posing at the front of a camera and rather kept his focus on the closest family, mainly his girlfriend or wife-to-be, and different animals he encountered in the bush-camp. The photographic collection of people and insects that he left with me was indeed impressive (see Jeffrey’s ‘photographic art’ in the

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Slideshow 01 on the accompanying DVD or follow the link). Video recording seemed important to him only in a few cases. He used it for singing and dancing.

Jeffrey experimented with traditional and new forms of singing and dancing trying to find a suitable combination. He brought together a group of dancing girls, while he and some other young men were singing and playing guitars. The whole performance was done by playback. When I tried to help them and discussed the possibility of them singing their own songs without playback it suddenly became more difficult. Although I knew some of their songs, which they wanted to record years ago, we actually never managed to do it. The endless discussions who owns what and who is going to participate in the video did not lead to a successful realization of plans. Jeffrey did not own any guitars, speakers, slit-drums, or microphones. He needed to borrow them from other guys. This meant that they would also like to participate in the clip. He had been away for too many years, and had to pull himself back, to avoid unpleasant and harming comments about the proud and all-too-knowledgeable ‘town-man’, to which the returnees had already been exposed.

Looking at the framing of Jeffrey’s photographs, their central focus and ‘mood’, it became obvious that he differed from others in this respect as well. He was usually very precise and often repositioned things, put them into centre, and did several shots just to be sure about the sharpness of the image. He kept systematic photographs of different periods, such as, for example, stages of his mourning mother after his brother died, growth of the newborn and small children of his closest relatives, a whole procedure from catching an animal and then cooking the meat and making a meal, and so on. Jeffrey also loved to draw, with precision and patience, sometimes looking at the images in different books for inspiration. At the

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end of my stay, I left the small Panasonic Lumix camera with him, including cards, batteries and charger. We agreed that he would send me some of his recordings and photographs once he would be in a town.

Plate 12: Jeffrey Donald Captain © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Through experiences with the Ambonwari who recorded their own environment and themselves, I learned that the camera is more than just a simple tool. In the village, it mattered who handled it and what the captured images were. It mattered whose chicken was killed and who was supposed to eat it. It mattered where one had caught the fish and whose bush-camp it was. I also felt that the Ambonwari were very innovative and deeply engaged in new discoveries and the creation of their life-world. They never collected things just to be put on the shelves. Everything had meaning and everything had its use. Even if something broke down, it was often wrapped in plastic and stored somewhere. At other times it was used until nothing was left. Once I observed how Augustina’s son Soroni totally dismantled two

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broken plastic lighters, took the spring from the one without gas and put it into another that still had a bit of gas. Many times I saw people with two lighters, one producing a spark and the other providing gas. Old batteries, for instance, were thrown in nearby bushes so that, as people explained, the leaking acid would chase away and poison the snakes. Of course, there were broken tools – and they are accumulating – which could not be repaired or reused anymore. There were also some broken cameras which on special occasions, regardless of their functional uselessness, were nevertheless brought to the light and carried around as a sign of prestige and modernity. It was also an act of mimesis connecting the life in the village to the one in town. Visual and aural means of perception and expression have always been central to the Ambonwari understanding of their existence and mimicking actions have been used for creating the desired world.

Therefore, it is important to look at the senses as they are lived and thought about by the Ambonwari and to explore the relationship between seeing and hearing, external appearance (arɨm ‘skin’) and internal understanding (wambung ‘feelings and thoughts’) in more detail. This will be the main focus in the next part of my thesis.

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PART II: World of Perceptions and Expressions

Plate 13: Martina Sanggrinja in a camp © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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What happens when we get engaged in different social and cultural surroundings, languages, aesthetics, laws, and habits? At the beginning we are often amazed at certain practices and expressions. We are all eyes and ears. We try to understand the new environment by using our own explanatory framework. We make mistakes and wonder about misunderstandings. Slowly, we learn to speak a new language and start to express our thoughts in a new way. We embody new habits and become capable of living in a different place. Our perception of the world gradually changes. Once, when I wandered around El Hierro, the smallest and farthest south-western island of the Canary Islands, a lady in her forties asked me: “Why are you doing that, travelling so much? I have television at home and I learn about the world from it.” I replied that unless I step on the ground with my own feet, touch the rocks, swim in the sea, breathe the air of the place, meet with the people and talk to them, I would not know what the place is actually about. The screen and television in particular is not the world, but its representation. The perceived images are not a substitute for tactile actuality. The Ambonwari would say that they are only spirits or shadows of different beings lacking the actual skin needed for a proper touch. What perceived images do is give us a glimpse of a place through stories and characters seen on the screen. The images alter the senses in a mediated way and create a new path for understanding enmeshed in our perceptual world.

There are several studies, mainly in philosophy and media and technology studies, that emphasize the connection between seeing and touching, which is becoming an important issue in today’s world of Virtual Reality built on computers (Deleuze and Guattari 1987 [1980]; Virilio 1994, 1997; Boellstorff 2008). However, for the

Ambonwari, the medium in between, television or computer, only seduces the

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sambɨs ‘eyes’ and wambung ‘insideness’ of a person, while not allowing him or her to actually touch. Coming from the technologically skilled world to the rainforest of

Papua New Guinea made me even more aware and alert about life in urban environments where distancing from the natural world, and from immersion in tangible relations, is becoming reality. People in towns take the simulated vision for a comfortable veracity of daily existence. Television, internet, and other audio- visual media are commonplace in the world for many people, at least a large part of their world. No wonder that the ‘eye’ within such a context became downcast and severed from the human observer (Crary 1994; Jay 1988, 1993; Levin 1993). The ongoing abstraction of vision has led to dematerialization of embodiment, reorganization of knowledge and social practices, and reconfiguration of the spatial environment, which exists only for those who are in that moment ‘there’, on the screen, in Virtual Reality (Crary 1994; Hayles 1993; Ellis 1998).1

In this part of my dissertation, I move from the camera-perceiver to perceptions and expressions of a person in the Ambonwari context. I discuss several case studies and focus on external appearance, internal understanding, and communication of

1 “The mind is fooled into believing the body is moving through space in the haptic sense, the body reaches out and objects dematerialize upon contact with the hand. A distance which is not exists perceptually, a disembodied perception. [Virtual Reality] puts the body into an intense feedback loop with a simulation which in a sense short-circuits the proprioceptive sense. Proprioception [the position of the body] defines the body’s boundaries and conveys the sense of bodily inhabitation; it creates the link between the body’s extension and habitually used objects. In [Virtual Reality] the proprioceptive sense flows out of the body to meet an object which does not exist and returns empty-handed in a feedback loop which tends to dematerialize the body itself. The body may be able to disappear into information, however embodiment cannot, for it is tied to the contextual and the enacted through incorporating and inscribing practices” (Ellis 1998: 7-8 following Merleau-Ponty 1998 [1962]).

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the seen and heard. If we look at some classical studies of visual and auditory perceptions of the world, we find quite a radical dichotomy between seeing and hearing. Seeing has been related to perception of space while hearing was considered more intimately connected to the perception of time (Ingold 2000). It was said that vision glimpses the surface and objectifies, whereas sound penetrates inside and thus personifies (Ihde 1976). While hearing binds people, seeing, being an individual act, isolates them (Ong 1982). This kind of differentiating of human perception was characteristic of philosophy (Descartes

1988, Straus 1963 [1935]), psychology (Paivio 1986), and linguistics (Hollander

1975, De Saussure 1959). Anthropology was never as radical as the other fields of human sciences. Because of complex cultural specificities, anthropologists could not readily generalize, but always looked at certain particularities, which then facilitated a more comprehensive image of societies. Long-term fieldwork was a necessity for such a detailed ethnographic account. Among more recent authors,

Tim Ingold is one of those anthropologists who approach the discourse about human perceptions with ‘a creative interweaving of lived experiences’ (Ingold 2000,

2011). In his writings, he focuses on perception of the environment, skill and knowledge, hearing and seeing in particular, and dwells on a fact that ‘looking-and- listening’ are aspects of one activity. They are both, as he writes, generated from movement simultaneously encompassing space and time. Together with them goes tactile perception. “[I]n the sunlight we see in, the rain we hear in and the wind we feel in. Participation is not opposed to observation but is a condition for it, just as light is a condition for seeing things, sound for hearing them, and feeling for touching them (Ingold 2011: 129). He argues that we see because we hear and we hear because we see. We can recognize that the approaching sound is the sound

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of a train, because we have already seen it and connected it with a particular kind of sound. What if we heard something many times, but had actually never seen it?

When in the village of Ambonwari I inquired about a particular sound which I heard at dusk, and asked what kind of a creature produced it, I was confidently told by everyone in Ambonwari that it was wusarma.2 When I asked what wusarma looks like, people were suddenly not so sure about it. Some said that it is a kind of beetle, others that it is a frog, and yet others that it is a kind of grasshopper or cicada. When I showed them a picture of pɨprɨs ‘fat brown frog’ some recognized in it wusarma, but later under the influence of others they agreed that wusarma was not a frog. When I asked almost everyone around if he or she had seen it, the answer was “no”. Only later, I realized that wusarma is a generic term for the insects that make a chirping noise, be it a cicada, cricket, beetle or a grasshopper.

This term sometimes – and for some – includes croaking frogs, at least some of them. Thus, wusarma captures a plurality of creatures joined in their capability for making chirping sounds, best heard at sunset or just before rain. Because wusarma has several images, the people were unable to show me a single one and got puzzled when I persisted to see it. Thus, “...the verbal conventions of a society do not come ready-made,” as Ingold writes, “nor are they simply superimposed upon the experience of its members so as to ‘make sense’ of it.

Rather, they are continually being forged and reforged in the course of people’s efforts to make themselves understood – that is to ‘make sense’ of themselves to others” (2000: 285).

2 The word is made of wus- ‘to blow, make sound by blowing, to chirp’, and the female ending -ma.

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The Ambonwari saying arɨm sambɨs ngandɨkɨm kwandɨkas ngandɨkɨm ‘skin has eyes and ears’ (Telban 1998: 54, 173) is about perceptions. The skin, arɨm, is the main sensory organ of which seeing and hearing constitute inseparable parts.

Similarly, the camera enables perception through its sambɨs ‘eyes’ (lens) and kwandɨkas ‘ears’ (microphone) and memorises in its wambung (interior). One does not see the wambung of a camera (video-tape or video-card are its internal organs as well as recording mechanism which makes a mark on them). Because of the invisibility of camera’s wambung, the Ambonwari freely speculated about what a camera actually does, just as they speculated about someone else’s wambung.

What is seen on the image is always perceived differently and understood by each viewer. Truth is related to visibility and what people cannot see with their own eyes, they can only speculate about. The verbal expression in Karawari, panbi ‘very much so, true’, is an agreement but not an absolute truth. It needs to make sense to the majority of those present. In this way ‘making sense’, whether for the

Ambonwari or for me, lies “in the involvement of whole persons with one another, and with their environment, in the ongoing process of social life” (Ingold 2000: 285).

The Ambonwari say that their environment is populated by spirits, sakɨnggar ‘spirits of the bush’ and wundumbunarɨnggar ‘spirits of dead people’. When a person dies his or her personal spirit, anggɨndar kwanar ‘watchman of light’, leaves a person and carries away also his or her wambung ‘insideness, understanding’. While usually the spirits are invisible they can nevertheless cross people’s paths and appear to them in a visible form. Sometimes this happens when walking or paddling in the bush, at other times in their dreams and visions, and even at times when watching a movie or looking at a photograph. Spirits also communicate with people through different signs and sounds. Everything is, however, immersed in

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the physical world of their surroundings. In the end, the Ambonwari say, ‘hands should follow eyes’ and everything seen has also to be touched. For example, when Robin sees lots of money in his dreams, he wants to hold it in his hands, and constantly questions how this could be achieved. On the other hand, when someone sees a sakima ‘female bush spirit’ in the forest one does not want any tangible contact with her, otherwise, as people say, one could die. In short, one needs to see, touch, and feel to understand the world. The same pertains to understanding the images. An Ambonwari’s creative agency aims towards the invisible world becoming visible and the hidden one becoming disclosed. In the following pages, I first explore the Ambonwari concept of arɨm ‘skin’, then move to a relationship between seeing and hearing, and finally address a question of interaction between the senses and wambung ‘insideness, understanding’. I present several examples that contextualize the visible and invisible domains of people’s lives and show how the boundaries between them are often traversed.

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CHAPTER Three: The Senses

Skin or Body?

Arɨm ‘skin’, for the Ambonwari, is the perceptive and protective surface of a living being: human, animal, plant, tree or stone. Skin covers bones, flesh, and inner organs. It is something that can be removed. It is a surface, which can be marked, cut, tattooed, or so to say ‘carved’. Skin is a cover and appearance seen by another being. Skin wraps and hides invisible wambung ‘insideness’. Thus, skin and the hidden interior form what is in Tok Pisin called bodi ‘body’. In Karawari terms one does not have a strong body, but one has strong legs or hands.3 One can also have strong skin as well as strong wambung ‘insideness’. While skin perceives and is perceived, wambung understands, memorises, feels and thinks.

By covering the skin with decoration of an ancestor, one can ‘become’ that ancestor. Applying clay to one’s skin marks and reflects a state of a person. By using white clay, for example, one shows that one is in the state of mourning after someone’s death. The clay is smeared all over the body including the hair and face. It is in contrast with the careful application of different clays for a feast. The white clay sticks on the skin, dries it up and amplifies the feeling of direness. The external appearance shows that one does not feel good and reflects the internal feeling of loss and grief. One feels bad inside and one feels bad outside too. One eats poorly, does not work and does not go to certain places. One wears old

3 See Appendix 2: Body with the Karawari terms for particular body parts.

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clothes, does not bathe, and men do not shave their beard. Ultimately, skin – being the border between exteriority and interiority – is something with which one touches and holds the ‘outside world’, while at the same time one is also touched and held by the ‘outside world’.

In a PNG context, several studies have dealt with body language (in rituals, singing and dancing), facial expressions and behaviour, body decoration, or the importance of mimesis in people’s lives (Forge 1971; Gell 1975; Goldman 1983;

O’Hanlon 1989; Strathern & Strathern 1971; Tuzin 1980). Michael O’Hanlon in his book Reading the Skin (1989) writes about the social significance of adornment and its display among the Wahgi people of Western Highlands Province in PNG.

“My appearance”, he writes, “was said to be identical to Kulam’s [FBS – father’s brother’s son] in certain respects, though it was thought I had lost a small distinguishing scar in changing my skin to return as a European” (O’Hanlon 1989:

7-8). While O’Hanlon had ‘put on’ a new skin, his insideness had remained the same: the one of the true Kulam. Some of the Ambonwari men, being proud of their sons who studied in towns or became leaders in the local church, told me that the skin of their sons was the same as mine, ‘white’. This reference to ‘the new race of white men’ (Lattas 1998: 223) and possibility of creation of this new white skin through mimesis and washing away of the old black one is common also to other parts of New Guinea. Lattas (1998: 218-225) provides a fascinating account of a woman called Melo who started a cult among the Kaliai of West New Britain of

PNG in the later 1970s. Mimicking the practices of the European men, Melo worked towards becoming not only ‘white’ but also a ‘man’. She made a copy of a camera from carved pieces of wood, photographed people, telling them they could be washed (developed like the photographic negative), then they could see that

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their skin has changed. The camera “condensed the process of becoming white into a material object that embodied the gaze and representational practices of

European culture, which could now be appropriated by Melanesians. A new way of developing the Melanesian subject was offered by the camera; it allowed people to develop themselves differently by developing differently the white gaze that captured them” (Lattas 1998: 223). There was no such movement in Ambonwari which could be compared to the cargo cults among the Kaliai. However, the racial issue of skin often surfaced in our discussions. My Ambonwari sisters often pondered in my presence saying that I eat their food, speak their language, own the clan’s name, and do the same things as they do, but my skin is still different to theirs. It is ‘white’. Moving away from Tok Pisin to Karawari vernacular it would actually be more proper to see my skin as being light or bright (not dark), as lightness and darkness better convey their own conceptualization of visual perception than colour oriented terms such as ‘white’ and ‘black’.4 On some other occasions when I unconsciously acted and behaved as the village women do, they said that my skin had become ‘dark’. In these kinds of contexts my actions not only determined my outer look including the skin, but they were also creating it. The villagers often said that everyone could see my appearance, but only a few knew what lies beneath. If my arɨm ‘skin’ was becoming ‘dark’, what was then happening with my wambung ‘insideness’? Was my interior also becoming ‘dark’? In many

4 O’Hanlon writes that the Wahgi people, just like the Ambonwari, have no terms for colour. The closest one could come to questioning the colour would be: What is its ‘skin’ like? This, O’Hanlon goes on to say, did not guarantee a colour term as an answer (1989: 116). I do not want to enter here into a classical discussion about universals in colour naming. Following the Ambonwari I can only say that their expressions reflect the light of particular appearances in their environment, angguringa- ‘bright, light, white’, wurukupɨsa- ‘dark, black, dark blue, brown, dark green’, awiya- ‘fire-like, orange, red’, and sɨmbɨs- ‘leaf-like, yellow, yellow green, light green’ (see Telban 1998: 188-189).

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other PNG societies the ‘verbal codes’ are distrusted and thus the acts and appearances of people’s interactions authenticate the verbal statements (Biersack

1982). In this sense the verbal and the visual, word and skin complement each other.

Nowadays, a dichotomy between dark and light skin people is widespread and constantly repeated. It mainly refers to differences in ways of living and wealth. The

Ambonwari put themselves into the first group, whereas I am put into the second one. Light skin beings are not only Europeans, Americans, or Australians, but also

Asians, Papuans, and the spirits of the dead. The powerful light-skin spirits are those with whom all other light-skin beings, including people, are identified.

Similarly to Ambonwari concepts of arɨm and wambung, the Orokaiva people of

Oro Province in PNG, as Ira Bashkow writes (2006: 96-100), have hamo (skin, body, the exterior surface of anything with depth) and jo (anything inside or interior). These concepts of interior and exterior are applied universally to all,

Bashkow continues, including to a ‘white’ person. “They [Orokaiva] take it for granted that each individual whiteman has an autonomous and unknowable jo that is of the same essential nature as the jos of Orokaiva. Just as it is hard for

Orokaiva to know or speak about the state of the jo of an Orokaiva person, it is hard for them to know or speak about the jo of a whiteman” (Bashkow 2006: 99, my emphases). For Ambonwari as well as the Orokaiva, the skin-body of a ‘white person’ is light, soft, bright, and clean. The ‘white people’ do not work hard in the bush; their skin stays young and soft. The lightness of ‘white-skin’ people is, in

Orokaiva, associated with their ability to travel. PNG people lack this ability because they are much more attached to the land and are involved in many social

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obligations and troubles which do not allow them to move as freely as ‘whitemen’ do.

For the Orokaiva, which is also relevant for the Ambonwari, the normal

moral existence also includes time when a person is ‘heavy’ with debt,

obligation, or grief, restricting his movements and limiting his ability to act in

ways that extend his influence over space, the apparent ease with which

whitemen regularly travel, and the vast distances they cover, suggest for

Orokaiva an extreme condition of lightness that is unbalanced by its natural

moral complement, the inevitable heaviness of human life (Bashkow 2006:

20-21).

When watching together with the Ambonwari a documentary about the first

Americans, Armstrong and Aldrin, stepping on the Moon in 1969, people questioned basic issues of gravity and lightness when seeing the astronauts walking as if they were carried by the wind. They, however, questioned the majority of issues that are very much related to the way of life on Earth. They asked: “Is there any house built on the Moon? Is there water to drink? How long can one stay there?” It felt that the Ambonwari wanted to detach themselves from the ground and get lighter, from problems with health and education, and establish relationships with the ‘outside world’.5 A ‘white person’ is in the Karawari language called angguringan, if male, and angguringanma, if female. As a verb, it means that one ‘starts to see’, one ‘opens the eyes’. When used as a noun, it means white, bright, and light-skin person, animal or some other being. With the connotation of

5 In Chapter Six, I bring the dichotomy of light and dark skin back into discussion with Ambonwari perception of the watched movies.

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‘opening the eyes’, I would say that one wakes up and enters a new dimension of life when surrounded by lightness and brightness. Being ‘white’, then, carries this kind of connotation. The possession by the Holy Spirit, I would say, is about something similar. It is an eye opener. It represents the entry into the white people’s world. For Ambonwari, it is about transformation, enlightenment, lightness, and access to the new knowledge, wealth, relationships, and power.

Removing, Changing, and Covering the Skin

One’s skin can be pretty or ugly, dry or fresh, tired and sick, heavy or light, and can be seen by anyone. One’s insideness, however, is private and only one. By changing the skin, one can change one’s appearance. One can take the skin of an ancestor or a totemic animal of his clan with all their characteristics. One can also gain new strength and acquire new capabilities to act in the new skin. Kapi, the founder of the Ambonwari village and the first ancestor of the Crocodile-1 clan, was given a special skill and power by Mambi (the founder of the Dog clan). Telban recounts one of the Ambonwari origin myths as follows: “Mambi came from the

Sepik River. He also wandered around alone [as Kapi did], sometimes as a man and sometimes as a dog” (1998: 150). Wherever Mambi moved, he stayed with the members of the Crocodile clan. When he met Kapi, he decided to give him the knowledge of how to change into a dog. Telban continues:

If you go hunting for your family, you will be able to change into a dog and

hunt as a dog. When you go to the bush you must carry a basket and a

spear. Cover the basket with leaves and call the name of Sapɨn in a

magical spell. Call Sapɨn and you will be a dog. You can carry your spear

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with you. Once you hold a pig or a cassowary, you can transform back into

a man and spear the animal (ibid.).

Plate 14: Sapɨn / Mambi © Dominic Bob 2011

Kapi learned how to change his skin, though he never met Mambi/Sapɨn again. In the honour of this spirit-man, with dual appearance but a single ‘insideness’, Kapi

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named two of his Crocodile-1 clan lineages after him: one is Mambinjam and the other one is Sapɨndam.

Another Ambonwari myth talks about the origin of the surrounding sago forest and all kinds of mosquitoes, two of the most discernible characteristics of the Karawari life-world. It is about Yanggun sakima ‘mosquito spirit-woman’ and belongs to the

Cassowary clan (Vávrová 2008). She travelled around the Karawari area beginning from Wayanggara Mountain at the source of the Konmei Creek and moving downriver to the Iatmul villages on the Sepik River. As an old woman she was seeking a man who would marry her, but no one wanted her. With a wrinkled skin hanging on her thin body she looked ugly to the people. When rejected by the men, she threw a basket of mosquitoes at each place where these men lived and left.

When finally a young man from Kanduanam village decided to marry her, she changed her skin. She rubbed off her old skin. Her old skin and white hair changed into the most important food of the area, the forests of sago palms. Besides being called Yanggun sakima ‘mosquito spirit-woman’ she also held the name

Sɨpɨnapasɨkmay ‘sago-bearing-woman’. She changed into a young woman and her skin became very smooth, shiny, and beautiful as if, as the Ambonwari say, she was misis, a ‘white woman’ in Tok Pisin.

The emphasis on the appearance of the surface or skin is a characteristic not only of Melanesian societies but can also be found in other similar cultural environments. Thus among the Arawak-speaking Mehinaku of Amazonia, for instance, “all the things/beings of the world are not what they seem, in a sense they are in fact shells”, writes Carla Stang (2012 [2009]: 48). “The world then”, she continues, “is only one of surfaces understood in terms of masks, houses, skins

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and most importantly clothing/covering” (Stang 2012 [2009]: 48-49). Similarly to the

Ambonwari’s myth about ‘mosquito spirit-woman’ but in reverse gender roles,

Stang tells a story of a beautiful young man who covers himself with a cape to avoid the gaze of all the women. No woman likes him as he looks old and ugly, just as Yanggun sakima did. Only when a young girl sees him in the forest taking off his poncho and bathing in the river, the hidden beauty is spotted and they get married.

In this sense the covering, the body-skin transforms one’s own appearance into an entirely new one. It is not everyone, of course, who can change their skin, but only the spirits and the sorcerers. This pertains to the Mehinaku as well as to the

Ambonwari understanding of changing skin. Viveiros de Castro writing about the issue of body and ‘clothing’ among the South American Indians wrote:

It is not so much that the body is a clothing but rather that clothing is a

body... To put on mask-clothing is not so much to conceal a human

essence beneath an animal appearance, but rather to activate the powers

of a different body. The animal clothes that shamans use to travel the

cosmos are not fantasies but instruments: they are akin to diving

equipment, or space suits, and not to carnival masks... the interest lies

more in what these clothes do rather than what they hide (1998: 482).

Similarly, as I have already written above, ‘the powers of a different body’ became apparent after Kapi received the second spell and knowledge how to become a dog and use his new appearance in hunting. The members of each Ambonwari clan closely identify with the animals, the names of which their clans bear. Thus any member of the Eagle clan can say that he flew around in his dreams and saw a rubber buyer coming to the village. Changing of skin means to be able to act in a

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particular way. The villagers will not question him as they know that he is capable of transformation. Being in the eagle’s skin, he can fly. They will rather look forward to the arrival of a rubber buyer. Just as a personal spirit can get into the skin of a particular animal, so can the forest spirit. When spirits enter other beings, human or animal, they bring with them their wambung ‘insidenes, understanding’. Thus, these beings will then act and perceive the world according to the spirits that entered them. My ‘sister’ Augustina once told me that the spirit of the Ambonwari village can appear at any time and in the form of any kind of animal. When a wild pig, for example, appears in the village and comes close to you, you know that it is a spirit and not a pig that you would kill and eat.

Plate 15: Eagle-man in a dream © Napoleon Sangri 2011

In Ambonwari, the bark of a tree is called arɨm ‘skin’. The skin covers the pith of a tree as it does the flesh of a human body. Arɨm is also a term for a little frog. It looks as if it had no meat but only skin. Skin that was removed from the rest of a

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body is called arɨng. The same expression is used for a mosquito net, the hide of a lizard pulled over a hand-drum, or a T-shirt that people wear. As skin is the border between external and internal worlds, the person, in particular situations, needs to be covered. Thus, a woven hood, andaypa, protects a newborn baby from the malevolent spirits, a young woman from the eyes of others, and a widow during the first months of mourning period from the look of the spirit of her dead husband

(Telban 1998; 2000).6 Andaypa, used mainly by the women, also protects from the cold and rain. Andaypa is also a term used for a shell of a turtle, a hat, and an umbrella.

The skin of a newborn child, and consequently its whole body, has to be strengthened immediately after birth to protect the baby. A mother will rub the skin of her baby-daughter for five days and her baby-son for six days with particular leaves for different purposes (see video-clip Waykakrarin about rubbing the skin of a baby-girl and strengthening her spine). The child will then be strong enough, as the mothers like to emphasise, to cut the trees, build a house, hunt, fish, and take care of the family later in his/her life. One will also look good and nice, which is a characteristic that goes hand in hand with body strength and the character of a person. In the video-clip, we can hear those present telling us that after a proper treatment is done during the first days after birth, the child will not have an unusually long nose, sticking out ears, or cranky legs. The child will become externally as well as internally smooth, straight or ‘all right’, as the Ambonwari say,

6 Skin has also many orifices – mouth, eyes, ears, nostrils, genitals, anus, under nails – through which spirits can penetrate the body. The healers paid special attention to spray the orifices of a sick person with a chewed ginger. In such a way they blocked the foreign spirits from entering the body and the spirit of a person from leaving it.

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because the mother was taking care and rubbed the proper leaves on the child’s skin straight after the birth.

When Shame and Sickness Climb on the Skin

Embarrassment and shame are felt on the skin according to those who discussed it in the PNG context (Epstein 1984, Schieffelin 1983, Telban 2004, Young 1971).

Shame is primarily a social issue. One is embarrassed in front of others because of an unfamiliar environment or because of one’s appearance and doings, which are recognized by the others as strange or unfamiliar. In her article about the self and self-decoration among the Hagen people in PNG, Marilyn Strathern writes:

The inner self is manifested through the body... One might say that the

inner self is the min or soul... A healthy body is thus a sign that the min is in

a good state... The same is true of noman or ‘mind’, sometimes located in

the chest, and much more like an organ of the body than the min. The

noman is very much inside, enveloped by the body, and is a source of

intention and desire. Hageners contrast what is on the skin with what is in

one’s noman. No one can see into another’s noman, only guess by his

behaviour what his inclinations are... Ordinarily a man keeps his desires,

intentions and material assets hidden. What he gives to others –

commitment, information, gifts – is under the control of his noman. Whereas

the contents of the noman always remain hidden, a person’s visible

resources, those he allows to be seen, are said to be ‘on the skin’. The skin

is the point of contact between the person and the world. Thus shame is

concerned with an individual’s enmeshment in social relationships, and

shame comes on the skin (1979: 250).

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Similarly Telban writes:

While fear may be experienced both in Heart [wambung ‘insideness’] and

on the skin, for Ambonwari shame is a state which is acknowledged only by

the skin. So the most common saying mɨrɨnggi ama sɨkan (I feel shame)

actually means arɨm mɨrɨnggi pɨnga sɨkan (I feel shame on my skin, shame

comes up on my skin). Yet for Ambonwari shame is a moral quality. It is

one of the major states consequent upon the relationship between people

(2004: 18).

Marilyn Strathern, however, asked: “Is the inside/outside dichotomy [among the

Hageners which is applicable to the Ambonwari too] simply a matter of the private versus the social?” (1979: 255). She concludes that “[t]he outer self, the skin, is thus decorated with the inner self, intrinsic attributes. This is done by taking objects from the outside world – feathers, leaves, shells – and attaching them to the body”

(1979: 254). Similarly the Ambonwari nowadays wear and desire to wear, Western clothes, hat, sunglasses, and boots. These ‘decorations’ reflect the people’s inner world and how the Ambonwari want to be perceived from the outside.

When one gets sick the Ambonwari say arɨm awi mbu kwasan ‘fire comes up on the skin’ (one’s skin is hot). It happened several times that a small two year-old boy from our house got a strong malaria attack. He is the son of one of Augustina’s unmarried daughters and I could closely observe discussions about how and why it happened as well as participate in the healing procedures. On one such occasion a young healer Jeffrey Donald (Captain) came to check Bradly at night. He sat and

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listened what had happened. Bradly’s mother, Bapra, said that when they had gone to check hooks and fishing net in the creeks, Bradly got suddenly sick. His spirit,

Bapra explained, stayed there, in the waters. He was kambra arɨm ‘skin nothing’ or

‘bodi nating’ (in Tok Pisin, only skin without the spirit) when they returned to the village. Before this happened Bapra and her mother Augustina had been arguing with each other for some days. Augustina was ordering Bapra what to do and

Bapra did not like to be scolded by her mother all the time. They were quarrelling and throwing each other’s things out of the house (plates, clothes, mosquito nets).

Bapra said that she had cried and had been worried. She did not perceive herself as doing anything wrong and concluded that her mother was simply that kind of a person who just shouted at others all the time. Because Bapra felt this, ‘her spirit was worried’ and her son got sick. The spirit of their dead father (Augustina’s husband) got angry too and decided that one of Bapra’s children should die. It was punishment for all the arguing with their mother. “Bradly had died but then woke up again” said Bapra. “Lucky Jeffrey came in time to catch Bradly’s spirit and brought it back to Bradly’s body”, she added. Jeffrey was listening. He pulled a stone from

Bradly’s chest, which he said the bush spirit inserted under the boy’s skin. Jeffrey explained that the spirit left the boy the day he got sick. That is why Bradly

‘changed the skin’. His ‘skin got hot’ and he acted as if he was possessed. Jeffrey continued: “You are arguing with each other all the time and that’s why the bush spirit got Bradly.” “When he was sitting on a tree branch”, Bapra remembered,

“when I called him to come back to our canoe he did not want to come, but apathetically sat. [The spirit had left him]”. Jeffrey said: “Yes, the bush spirit entered him. You cannot carry him around when he gets sick. He is weak and bush spirits can easily possess him. Lucky I came in the right time and called his spirit back into the body. I put a ginger leaf into his mouth to stop the spirit from going

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away. If Bradly had spat the leaf out, he would have died in a few days. I would not be capable of helping him. It happened to one girl who died recently. We saw signs before death got her. We saw bloody betel pepper [red catkin of wild Piper betel], and a spirit was running after a man that day too [signs of approaching death]. Now it is up to you how you will settle dispute between the two of you.” Bradly fell asleep while we were talking about him. Augustina was feeling sorry for everything that had happened and held him in her lap.

Plate 16: Augustina with Bapra’s son Bradly © Daniela Vávrová 2011

The topic of our discussion shifted to a bush spirit that Jeffrey had met several times in the bush-camp. He explained how he had fought with him. Once he wanted to get the spirit’s string bag full of betel nuts, betel pepper, and aromatic bark for chewing. When he put his hand into the bag, all the things changed into a snake. He said that this was a spirit who lives in a tree. His fingernails are long and his eyes are different to the spirits of the dead ones. He has light skin as a ‘white

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man’ and apparently he will one day come to seduce the youngest of Augustina’s daughters, Maia. The spirit also possesses something that Jeffrey has not seen yet, but saw it wrapped in a blanket. Maia was laughing saying that it was true as she felt at night that a ‘man’ was lifting the bark floor under her mosquito net. She had a dream about this spirit-man. She saw him carrying two guns and he wanted to sleep with her in her mosquito net. She was afraid and rejected him. Jeffrey said:

“Wait, this is a sign for you all, the family. I saw him carrying something around. It is something rounded. I would like to get it from him. He is not a bad spirit. So if he gives you that something rounded give it to me.” All were laughing as Maia became scared. After some weeks, Bradly recovered and was running around again, though malaria attacks were coming back regularly every second day for some time. We can see how the Ambonwari connect different stories and events and something that one saw some days ago could signal an event that could happen a few days later. Many villagers do not go to the bush when ‘their skin is weak’ as they are vulnerable to be possessed by the bush spirits. They know that the main causes of troubles often are disputes among them, which must be settled and solved in some way. They cannot keep being angry and arguing with each other because someone will get sick and eventually die. They have to look after their skin. Looking after one’s skin begins at birth and continues throughout one’s life until old age. As the last example has shown, a child is not responsible for his or her sickness. It is the fault of their parents or carers, whose wrongs are then reflected in poor health of their children. This example also shows how visible and invisible domains of people’s lives are interrelated.

My other ‘sister’ and namesake Sapet told me that constant gossip and the loss of customary practices make people sick too. In 2011 she mourned for her dead son.

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She stayed within the house or sat in their kawara, haus win ‘resting house’ in Tok

Pisin, selling betel nuts. Her skin was covered with the white clay all the time. We often sat together with our other ‘sister’ Augustina and discussed different issues about past and present practices. On one such occasion Sapet said:

Ambonwari do not follow tradition anymore. There are many women who

have problems in delivering a child. They do not listen to the stories of the

past. They say: ‘Ah, it belongs to you old women. It belongs to the past. It is

a different time now.’ There are no rules anymore, which would enable one

to get married properly. Before, the girls and boys were strong because

they were initiated. They learned how to keep healthy and deliver many

children, how to work and not get sick. Nowadays, they are like kambɨs [tall

thin grass], yarakɨnggi [little frogs that have no buttock], pandanggi

pandanggi kapɨs kaya, arɨm kaya, yawng kaya, kapɨs kaya [sticks for stirring

the sago pudding with no buttocks, no skin, and no flesh]. All [girls and

boys] get engaged too young. Young parents are very skinny, with no

buttocks and no muscles. We, the older generation, did not have flu, aches

in our stomachs and other problems as they encountered nowadays,

because we had and followed the custom.

There is an obvious recognition and awareness of the loss of tradition. Older people like to say that there are no values left and that this is reflected on people’s skin. While this may be just a nostalgic view of the old people who had lost control over the youth it is also quite obvious that abandonment of custom is often found as the main reason for illness or social disorder. Yet the people do not know how to change it. It is not that they would wait for the ‘whites’ to help them, but they try to

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find their own new way to improve their wellbeing. One of the issues that custom was quite strict about, was relationships between men and women. Jeffrey’s

‘brother’ Jack, who is also a healer and tried to ‘heal’ my camera, told me that when we look today at the Ambonwari men, they are smaller than they used to be when they still followed the customary practices and obeyed taboos. It is because the men were drinking the water from a different creek than the women did. The men were bathing before dawn when women and children were not awake yet and they never jumped into the water downstream from the place where women used to bathe. They did not eat food prepared by a menstruating woman.7 Nowadays,

Jack continued, they not only get shorter in growth, but also get more frequently sick. The water is polluted by women and children and those women who have recently given birth to a child. The same water is then used in many households for drinking and cooking. When hearing about these issues in Ambonwari, I was wondering that on the one hand I supported the present day life of women who were much less oppressed by their men than I was told was the case in the past.

On the other hand, I felt that something, a new social agreement, culture, or law, was missing. While in the past, people say, it was clear what to do and how to behave in particular situations of distress and confusion, nowadays the question of

7 Many ethnographies dealing with PNG societies discuss the relationship between men and women, and fear of pollution in particular. Thus, for instance, Strathern & Strathern wrote that “[i]n everyday affairs, a woman who is menstruating or who had recently given birth to a child (which puts her in a similar condition) has to avoid her menfolk, since contact with her would pollute them. For the same reason, although wives could ordinarily accompany their husbands into the cemetery to help them decorate for an exchange festival (not warfare), a menstruating woman could not do so. Nor would a menstruating woman herself decorate or participate in dancing. There are sanctions here: in general she would make any feathers she touched or wore dull, and more specifically the oil in her own flasks as well as those of her husband would dry up” (1971: 137).

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values loomed large. Because of all this, people explain, their ‘skins’ (bodies) get tired faster than they did in the past. It became clear that the Ambonwari started to reflect upon the changes in their appearances over time and space, and their perception has been heavily influenced by the incoming images of ‘white people’ and their ways of living. Perception via eyes and ears is perspectival (Viveiros de

Castro 1998, 2012), which means that a single spirit can inhabit different bodies, either those of other human beings or animals. Thus, a spirit of an Ambonwari can return after death as a ‘white’ person or can in dreams and rituals, for instance, take the appearance of a powerful animal.

Eyes and Ears8

Seeing and hearing are the two perceptual modalities which are most emphasized in Ambonwari social interactions. Both ‘absorb’ the inputs from the outside. Seeing, as Ambonwari say, is the fastest of all the senses, regardless that hearing is often salient when people are deep in the forest (see Feld 1990 [1982]). The eyes are the first to notice something, they can see over a longer distance than ears can hear. One of the villagers told me the following:

Eyes and ears, the two are very important, that’s why we say arɨm sambɨs

ngandɨkɨm kwandɨkas ngandɨkɨm [‘skin has eyes and ears’]. Eyes see first,

ears confirm it and mouth then says what those two have seen and heard.

Eyes are very important. I am not worried about ears too much. You can

cover your ears and walk around, but how can you move without seeing?

When I smell possum, for example, I have to look up the tree to confirm it.

8 Both sambɨs ‘eyes’ and kwandɨkas ‘ears’ in Karawari exist only in plural.

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When I am approaching the trap I made, I will hear a cry of the caught

animal. I will look at the trap and see the animal, it is not a pig but a goura

pigeon. I saw it and thus confirmed it. The mouth should not say things too

fast. First I need to see and hear it and then I can talk about it. Often people

just talk, but when I see it with my own eyes, I believe it is true.9

Ambonwari eyes are skilled in distinguishing slight details hidden in the vastness of greenness, where the majority of important things and creatures are invisible for the unskilled eye of a foreigner (a bird’s nest, a centipede, a footstep, or edible greens). People consider seeing, not only as a process of disclosing and uncovering the ‘truth’, but also as an act of possession.

Kapuk ‘sound’ is everything from the calling of birds to raindrops hitting a huge banana leaf at the back of the house, from sounds of different insects to the whispering, talking, and shouting of people, from clouds making thunder to teeth chattering. A fish also makes sound when looping over the water-surface. An aeroplane makes sound while it is often hardly visible from the ground, especially when one is in the overgrowth of the rainforest. The local Karawari name of a plane is kripan ‘beetle’, which seems well chosen once one becomes familiar with the sound of a particular beetle.10 Thus, people use the term kripan also when talking

9 Conversation with Greg was recorded on video camera in 2011 and translated by me in 2012.

10 The Ambonwari carefully chose old expressions in the local Karawari language for new things which were brought to the village from the towns. The majority of these terms were appropriated according to the sound that the things emitted and the look they had (see Appendix 3).

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about a generator or outboard motor. Another term used for sound or rather noise is arangɨnɨng. The term covers creaking and cracking noise, the sounds of walking on dry undergrowth, or of a rat running on the roof. I found it interesting that both terms kapuk ‘sound, call’ and arangɨnɨng ‘noise’ are used with the verb pay- which can refer either to sleeping or to rumbling and to making noise. Kapuk can be used also with other verbs such as, ‘come out’, ‘call’, or ‘beat’, while arangɨnɨng cannot.

The verb ‘to hear’, andi-, is used for listening, perceiving, and understanding. One hears and thus understands the language. The children may or may not listen to their parents. It is significant that smelling is expressed by the verb ‘to hear’ with an additional noun denoting the odour, morum andɨkan ‘hear the smell’ (see also

Aikhenvald 2008: 558 for the Manambu and Feld 2005: 187 for the Kaluli). Seeing is, from a linguistic point of view, connected to a place. The verb sanggwa-, ‘see, look’ is a homonym of sanggwana ‘where’. If we consider the verb ‘see’ as a serial verb construction, we could say that sanggwana is made up of two verbs: sa- ‘hold, touch, sit’ and ang- ‘give, put something on a visible place, make something glow’.

Thus, one could say that to see is to hold something glowing. For the neighbouring

Yimas whose language like Karawari also belongs to the Lower Sepik Family,

Foley translates the prefix tanŋkway- by ‘carefully’. This incorporated visual adverb

“expresses that the action being accomplished is being carefully monitored by vision” (Foley 1991: 339). To taste or try something, ambindanggwa-, is expressed with the verb sanggwa- ‘see’ in a compound with the verb am- ‘eat’ (for a similar way of expression among the Manambu, but not among the Kaluli, see Aikhenvald

2008: 556). I do not want to imply that the Ambonwari actually hear the smell and see the taste, but there is obviously the cultural weight and priority given to hearing and seeing in people’s active relationship with the external world. One may also

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say that in the Karawari language there is a recognition and appreciation of synaesthesia.

The Problems of not Seeing in the Dark and Seeing the Spirits

Joel Robbins writes that “[v]ision is so important to the Urapmin because, for them, to live in a particular kind of world is to see it... The Urapmin worry so much over eye injuries because they believe that without the ability to see it is impossible to live as a Urapmin person” (2004: 140). This implies that a blind Urapmin individual is not perceived as being a proper person. In Ambonwari sambɨs kanar ‘blind man’

(Lit. ‘man without eyes’) is a term which is used not only for a blind man but also for an ignorant man who is unable to notice what is going on around him. It is definitely a characteristic, which denies such a person the social recognition available to others. Among the Urapmin people of West Sepik Province one can also find concepts of skin (ipnal) and the inside, the heart (aget tem), which is a place where understanding, thoughts, feelings and desires arise (Robbins 2004: 139). The expression of ‘open eyes’ in Karawari and also among the Urapmin (Robbins 2004:

140) is about being alive and awake, and being perceptive of and responsive to surroundings, other human beings, and the spirits.

The visual distance, the horizon or arari ‘view over open space’ in Ambonwari is limited to the curves of the creeks, a few grasslands, clearings for new gardens, and the spaces between the trees and their tops. The horizon that the Ambonwari environment provides is shrunk and lacks a wider or overarching visual spectrum.

On the other hand, like people everywhere in the world, the Ambonwari also developed a culturally specific skill of observing their environment. Thus, I would say after claims of many individuals, that their sight within a close distance is very

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sharp and they can detect even minor movements in the thicket, slight differences in brightness, or a particular shape that indicates food or danger. The learning process of catching fish, for example, is purely visual and tactile act (work of hands with a hook on a string or a spear).11 To see is to understand the surrounding waters and to know where to put the hook. One has to see where the water comingles, where the fish left their traces, where the water is too clean to have fish, what technique to apply, and what bite to use. The fisherman’s medium is less the hook than it is sight. The hook follows the sight. To be a good fisherman, one needs to train one’s eyes. What Sobchack wrote about a painter and a filmmaker could be applied also to a skilled Ambonwari fisherman: “The painter’s medium, the filmmaker’s medium, is less paint or film than it is sight. Indeed, at their most rigorous, both painter and filmmaker practice a phenomenology of vision”

(Sobchack 1992: 91). From an early age children learn to see hidden things and creatures, camouflaged in the forest, crawling within the plenitude of bush materials.

One must see in order to move in space or move slowly with the help of touch, say the Ambonwari.12 People get confused and bewildered at an unfamiliar place in the

11 See Slideshow 02 with MP3 sound file on the accompanying DVD: Fishing with Augustina Awsay or follow the link.

12 “Touch”, Ingold writes, “confirms the materiality of the visible. Hence the motility of the body is a factor in the very constitution of vision and of the seen world” (2000: 259). One relies on a general level of experience of surroundings to orient oneself. The experience does not present the senses to us as being all equal, wrote Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1998 [1962]: 234 f.n. 1). “I think that visual experience is truer than tactile experience, that it garners within itself its own truth and adds to it, because its richer structure offers me modalities of being unsuspected by touch. The unity of the senses is achieved

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forest, not knowing which direction to take. They take care to return to the village before dark. One of the older Ambonwari men told me how he got lost in the bush and had to stay there throughout the whole night. He went to find the large edible grubs, anyamuni, hidden in dry flowering sago palms. One needs to go to uncut bush and search for them as not every dry palm has them inside. It is often a lottery and one may come back without the grubs.13 The above mentioned man was fully unprepared for spending a night in the bush. He went too far and did not manage to return to the path in time. He stood and sat at one spot the whole night.

He heard all sorts of sounds, but saw only fireflies. It was the longest night of his life. His experience is far from being unique. Many other men have been through the same episode and had to be brought back to the village by the searching party early in the morning. While the latter used garamut (slit-drum in Tok Pisin) and horn to announce their presence, intentions and directions, those lost were left to calling and beating on hollow tree trunks to mark the spot where they were. It was hearing of the sounds that finally brought them together, saving the lost man.

transversally, according to their own structure... the taking over of sensory experiences in general in visual experience, and that of the functions of one eye by the other – prove that the unity of experience is not a formal unity, but a primary organization” (Merleau-Ponty ibid.).

13 Anyamunanma (singular) is a large grub. It differs to ordinary sago grubs that people collect after cutting a wild sago palm and there is a wait usually for four or five weeks before they are ready to be gathered in their sweetest stage. Anyamuni (plural) are not eaten as often as wuni ‘sago grubs’, but are collected by older experienced men for special occasions.

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People are often faced with a challenge to move around in the dark. They use torches whenever possible. They hunt bandicoots and ducks at night with torches and they use them on nightly fishing trips. They try to stay on familiar paths and move around familiar places. They also drive their canoes at night when somebody at the front examines and shows the route with a spotlight. However, it often happens that they are left without any light. Then, the Ambonwari usually decide to camp overnight at the closest familiar spot. When driving a motor-canoe at night without a torch, one looks up at the sky and follows the winding gap between the top of trees which indicates the flow of a turning river. But such a drive is neither pleasant nor easy. The driver fears hitting the invisible tree trunks in the creek that will cause damage to the outboard motor. People’s eyes learn to see in the dark.

Their eyes are also accustomed to seeing otherwise invisible things, and I would like to present here two separate accounts about seeing a dwarf-like bush spirit.

These stories add to already discussed Ambonwari perceptions of bodies of their ancestors and the possibility of bodily transformation. Both stories were told by the older Ambonwari men and both of them, on separate occasions and at two different places, saw the forest spirit in the shape of a very small man.

The first man, Francis, recounts his story as follows. He was paddling to check the bite on his fishing string and found out that he had caught a big fish. He tried to catch more fish but being unsuccessful, he decided to go to find fire in order to light his cigarette in the garden of his younger brother Peter. When approaching the garden, Francis saw a small man coming from a garden house. The little man then walked on the path near the creek. He wore blue trousers and T-shirt with a yellow collar. Francis wanted to ask him if there was still glowing fire in the garden house, but he did not. The dwarf-like man looked at Francis by hiding his face and then

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disappeared into the bush. Francis thought that it had to be one of the boys who had gone to get betel nuts in the nearby garden. But when he arrived to the garden with betel nut palms nobody was there. Francis wondered if he had seen saki ‘bush spirit’ or wundumbunar ‘spirit of a dead man’ and paddled further. When he approached another garden, he heard a man fearfully screaming. It was one of

Francis’ classificatory sons. He wanted to put his fishing net into the creek, but suddenly noticed a strange little man walking around. He quickly folded the net back into his canoe and paddled to the middle of the creek. At that moment Francis knew that it was the bush spirit who looked like Peter’s dead son. When he returned to the village he told Peter what had just happened: “It was a bush spirit.

He looked like your son, wearing the same trousers and T-shirt. Boys and girls should not paddle down there alone. There is a ‘man’ who sits in the garden house.

This spirit has killed your son.” What Francis actually saw could be many things. It could be a boy who came to steal something from Peter’s garden; it could be a young man who met or wanted to meet with his girlfriend; or it could be just a ray of light within a constant movement of bushes, vines and leaves. There is also a possibility that Francis actually saw the spirit of the boy. The ‘spirit-boy’ covering his face could in the view of the Ambonwari indicate any of these options.

However, Francis’ thoughts were elsewhere. Thinking of Peter’s dead son while paddling near his garden could easily influence his vision. Besides, Francis is one of the most devoted traditionalists even though he is also an active member of the local Catholic Church. To make his story truthful he said that his classificatory son also saw the spirit even though the latter had never confirmed it. But he had not denied it either. How could he, when Francis was his classificatory father. The story stayed as told and Francis was not reapproached for inventing it. Anyhow, his story was not other people’s business.

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Another meeting with a forest spirit was a bit different. Kenneth began his story with an amusing tone saying how he saw a very little man, a dwarf, near an oil tree where this little man hid himself. They were running after each other around the tree before the dwarf hid in it. Then Kenneth explained that in the past there was, on this bush land, a woman, Woprangmay, who gave birth to a baby-girl in the sago forest but sakima ‘spirit-woman’ took the baby from her. He went on to say that the spirit-women of the forest take the real children for themselves when mothers leave them unattended. They put the same looking spirit-child on the same spot instead. Thus, the spirit-girl grew up, married a spirit-man from the forest of the Kenneth’s clan, and had a son. This was the boy whom Kenneth saw and was running after him. “The spirit-boy came here to see his grandmother, but when I appeared he ran away and hid himself” said Kenneth. That night Kenneth saw the boy in his dream: “The spirit-boy came into my ‘empty skin’ [body without its spirit while sleeping] and he told me that he came to see his grandmother; that is why we met there.” Kenneth thus realised that the spirit of Woprangmay, the woman whose child was stolen, was still there although he thought she had disappeared a long time ago.

Kenneth, one of three village committeemen, of rather traditional orientation, is known as one who invents and exaggerates things. He is always full of stories that startle the listeners. This story was old and was not told only to me, as others had already heard it. As a committeeman, he always emphasised that women should take care of their small children, not leaving them alone when doing their work. The story could simply support his demands with an example of what could happen if the women did not act in the way as they were told. Both stories, the one of Francis

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and the other of Kenneth, are about the bush-spirits who, in the view of the

Ambonwari, still dwell in the Ambonwari rainforest. Regardless of Christianity and the Catholic charismatic movement, in particular, trying to erase them from people’s lives, the bush spirits remain present, taking up their visible forms at specific times and places and for particular people. Both Francis and Kenneth claimed that they saw the spirits with their own eyes. Peter went to sleep in his garden shed after Francis told him the story. He thought of meeting the dwarf who looked like his deceased son. Both Francis and Kenneth saw the forest spirits, who were closely related to their dead and their land. Kenneth questioned if the use of taboo places, which in the past stayed untouched but nowadays are cleared to make gardens and camps (see Telban and Vávrová 2010), could be the reason for meeting with the spirits more often than it was the case in the past. Not everyone in the village, Francis and Kenneth included, was satisfied with the directives of the leading members of the Catholic charismatic movement to totally abandon the custom.

Hidden Things of the Past and the Visions of the Charismatics

People claim that the past was characterised by actions, things, and beings, which could not and should not be seen. This pertained first of all to the practices of male and female initiations and to the objects hidden in the men’s houses. One of the first issues that the Catholic charismatic movement addressed was to make things seen, to uncover them for all, to place them into an open space. The carved spirits from the men’s house were taken out and exposed to the eyes of everyone, while the usually invisible spirits of Ambonwari land and creeks started to be ignored.

Another issue equally important was to get rid of hidden talk and make every discussion public. People say that in the past kupam ‘big men’ hid and held the

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knowledge for themselves. Their communication with the spirits, as the first leader of the Catholic charismatic movement said, resembled a private communication over a mobile phone. There were visions (of Virgin Mary) and hearing of voices (of

God and the Holy Spirit) that started the Catholic charismatic movement. These images and sounds became accessible to everyone. They continue to be seen and heard in dreams and during times of possession by the Holy Spirit. The voices are heard as if coming from a radio, so that anyone can hear them. Of course, one needs to have belief in the spirit, pray and be chosen. Joel Robbins writes:

It is the epistemological role the Urapmin give to the senses of sight and

hearing and the way they evaluate three oppositions related to them: the

seen versus the heard, the hidden versus the open, and speech versus

action. It was this less well known side of the epistemology of secrecy that

provided the door through which Christianity was able to enter Urapmin

culture as a source of authoritative knowledge (2004: 138).

Just like the Ambonwari, the Urapmin also give priority to seeing over hearing and the eyes are the most important sense organ (Robbins 2004: 139). Robbins continues:

In general, the Urapmin conceptualize processes of gaining useful

knowledge in terms not of hearing things but of ‘seeing’ or ‘being shown’

them. The latter phrase is the primary description of what went on in

initiations, for example, and each initiatory stage as a whole could be

described metonymically by the main things the novices were ‘shown’

during it... Teaching and learning are thus understood as made up of acts of

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showing and seeing, not of telling and hearing. It is not surprising, then, that

the verb –tamamin can mean not only ‘to see’ but also ‘to know’. In

Urapmin, knowledge is in important respects equated with sight (2004:

141).

For the Ambonwari, speech is a medium of catalysing environmental and social density in which people dwell. Verbally expressed ‘truth’ is not absolute, but the result of agreement between all those who are present. Things not known to all, or matters where interests do not overlap, or actions which produce disputes, sickness or death, can therefore have many ‘truths’. It comes as no surprise that verbal agreement is expressed by panbi ‘very much so’ or pan mariawk ‘very thoughtful speech’. On the other hand observational ‘truth’, agreement related to the ways of doing things, is expressed by mbayaw ‘O.K., all right’, mba mɨndɨn

‘that’s it, like that’ or just mɨndɨn ‘thus, in this way, like that’, that is by sayings which primarily recognize and confirm one’s practice. The talk of God, as the Ambonwari say, is based on hidden knowledge because they have never seen God as such.

The proof of God’s existence becomes visible through spirit possession and healing of people. Many cannot read the Bible but through seeing the images, listening to the Parish priest, the prayer leaders and Bible readers, they remember well what God was saying. They, however, need to materialise the spoken word into concrete action, a tangible thing, and a visible proof (Lattas 2010, Robbins

2004, Telban 2008).

The customary rituals in the past, just like Christian ceremonies in the present, produce something that people look at, conceptualize, and use for creation of the future. The customary rituals in contrast to ordinary Christian practices,

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incorporated much more actual action than talking. Talk is also the main concern of the ordinary Catholic Church in the village. People say that it is because of talking

– gossip, concocted stories, wrong or justified accusations – that people fight and get sick, regardless of their regular confessions and prayers. Regardless of abundance of food in rivers, forests and gardens, not to mention the sago swamp where sago starch is extracted from individual palms, people do not consider that the evening meal is proper if there is no fish or meat on their sago pudding.

Therefore one often hears, especially when water is fluctuating, that they have no food. People do not really like eating plain sago pudding only with greens or coconut. They say that their ‘plate is empty’ and they sleep hungry. The Ambonwari do not think of climate change or a reduced supply of meat or fish as resulting from over-hunting or over-fishing. They blame God or the spirits respectively. Sickness has always been a cause in their own wrong-doings and unresolved arguments, jealousy and greediness. People do not have the same trust in God as they had in the bush-spirits. By being a white God, it is often too 'far away' instead of being embodied in them and emplaced in their landscape. In the video-clip Kay

Wurukrarin ‘Rocking Canoe’, Augustina explains how the food which was put into the men’s house was eaten by the bush-spirit, although they did not see or smell him. Likewise, she says, they do not see God. They were, however, heard by the bush-spirits in their plea for a successful hunt and they caught as many pigs as they asked for. With God, she says, it is different. One has to pray in solitude; must be fortunate to obtain the right phone number of God; and still things may not happen as one would want to. Only a few individuals, the most devoted Catholic charismatics, were able to get personal number that connects them to God. The engagement with the bush-spirits and the land people inhabit, is quite different to the engagement with God and the Holy Spirit. However, just as they believe that

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God struggles with their spirits of the land, they also envision that Heaven has to be under the earth and not somewhere in the sky.

Seeing and Understanding

In the view of many who work in the fields of psychology and philosophy, vision has a central role in the constitution of the self and the other (Sobchack 1992: 99). In the anthropology of PNG, vision and the visual received much less attention or were dealt with indirectly by addressing different issues of social life (i.e. gaze and shame as mentioned earlier). Much has been written about socialization through talking; about gossip; and the importance of hearing (Brison 1992; Feld 1990

[1982], 2005; Feld and Basso 1996; Gell 1995; E. Schieffelin 1976; B. Schieffelin

1990; Tuzin 1984). I want to argue, that in Ambonwari all the senses are implicated in vision. Simultaneously vision is “sensorially integrated, embodied and experienced” (Edwards and Bhaumik 2008: 3). It is one’s skin with eyes and ears that interconnect all the senses together which then provides the person with the sense of the world. It is the capability of the senses to orient a person in space and time and to provide them with information about what is familiar and what is not, what is threatening and what is not, and what is pleasant and what is not. An

Ambonwari conventional common saying is that the eyes are fast and that seeing precedes hearing. This, of course, does not hold at night without the moon when seeing is disabled. But it is exactly this disability that is reflected in some people’s confusion when caught in total darkness again that proves the primacy of the visual sense in the Ambonwari life-world. While hearing can be deceptive, and hearing someone talking even more so, eyes in people’s opinion cannot lie. Of course, one has to enter into the process of recognition and understanding of what one sees and hears otherwise both senses would be meaningless. Things, beings and

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practices can remain unrecognizable and incomprehensible, but that does not stop one from observing and trying to understand them. That is where wambung

(insideness, thoughts, feelings, understanding) comes to the forefront and reveals to the people both context and content of what is seen and heard. My ‘sister’

Augustina told me when discussing this issue that: “Eyes will see, wambung will like it, thoughts will move me. Hand will follow and get it.” On a different occasion

Sapet’s husband Donald said: “Eyes, wambung, and thoughts, you use all the time.” It should be explained here that both thinking and feeling are in the Karawari language found in wambung (insideness, area around solar plexus) and it is only by additional verbs that the two are distinguished. Wambung with the verb si- ‘feel, do, become’ captures care, worry, love, desire, and attraction, while wambung with the verb aykapi- ‘think, remember, know’ captures thoughts and memories.

Wambung

While the visible part of a being is its external arɨm ‘skin’, the invisible interior, especially around the upper abdomen, is called wambung ‘insideness’. From the onomatopoeic perspective wambung can be understood as ‘beating of a heart’.

Wam- is a verb meaning ‘to go inside’ and together with -bung they create a sound wam-bung, wam-bung (Telban 1998: 59). This internal core pertains also to animals, plants and other living beings. Thus for someone or something being with wambung, we can talk about them ‘being alive’. One sees, hears, and feels.14

Wambung is also a place where understanding is formed, where sadness, anger, or care are felt. As people say, it is impossible to see how one feels and thinks (see

14 The anatomical heart is in Karawari called sɨsɨnɨng ’seed’ (see Appendix 2 for Karawari terms of body parts).

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also Rumsey and Robbins 2008). This can be only be revealed through kay ‘way of doing things, custom, habit’, mariawk ‘speech, talk’, and through external skin- body. In his earlier writings, Telban (1993) refers to wambung by Heart, with a capital letter. He writes:

To have Heart means that you have understanding and desires, and that

you are ‘attuned’ to public sentiment. You have already learned the way of

the village, you are able to think, you are able to remember. Having Heart

means that you are a ‘proper’ social and moral person. Interaction between

people, between people and their environment is represented by Heart

(Telban 1993: 159).

Very young children do not have wambung yet and they do not know the way of the village (imɨnggan kay) either. They need to learn many things. Once they express their care for others, get knowledge about surrounding forests and creeks, acquire skill to hunt and catch fish, make canoe and house, only then they have Heart. In the past when Ambonwari young boys were initiated, they were transformed into another domain of their life-world (Telban 1997a). Before that, they existed as extensions of their parents and carers. They were ‘non-beings’. “It is only in the male initiation ritual, seen as a cosmogonic event, that young boys are cut off from their parents and ‘thrown’ abruptly into a state of becoming. Unlike the healing rites, these rituals treat young boys as both Ambonwari beginnings and Ambonwari beings” (Telban 1997a: 308). He argues that “Ambonwari initiation rituals are not concerned with symbolic death followed by rebirth, but with states of being.

Initiation means that death becomes possible for a child. The initiated boy will now be able to die as an Ambonwari being” (Telban ibid.).

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For Ambonwari it is wambung (Heart, understanding) together with anggɨndarkwanar / anggɨndarkwanma (personal spirit, male / female) enabling a person to act and thus constructing one’s character (kay). Manambu people of

Avatip in PNG call understanding mawul (Harrison 1990, Aikhenvald 2008).

Together with Spirit (kaiyik), mawul constitutes the selfhood (Harrison 1990). Both, wambung and mawul are about the ‘empathic disposition’ towards other people

(Harrison 1990: 90, Telban 1998: 60). In his book Dancing through Time (1998),

Telban discusses the similarities and differences between mawul and wambung.

Whereas in Avatip the two, spirit and understanding, are seen as counterparts, in

Ambonwari spirit has understanding (Telban 1998: 61). An example of this is dreaming time. When an Ambonwari person is asleep, their spirit, anggɨndarkwanar

/ anggɨndarkwanma, travels. When seeing something bad, one can wake up, unconsciously talk, or wildly move. The skin-body is without the spirit during dreams (‘empty skin’ as Kenneth said in his story). Another example is when someone dies. The spirit of the dead person, wundumbunar / wunduma, takes wambung with it and preserves many of the dead person’s characteristics (male spirit, for example, giving sickness to his own kin but not to others). What is left is

‘just skin’, kambra arim. Harrison says that understanding is connected to hearing, whereas speaking is connected to the spirit. Telban says that for Ambonwari to have Heart means both to be capable of listening and talking. Both abilities constitute the wambung of a person (Telban ibid.). Expressions such as anger, likeness, confusion, fear, are all connected to wambung. When one is angry, for example, one says: wambung amanan kaynggian inga paykan, literally meaning

‘my insideness sleeps on the side’. Wambung amanan min kwasar ‘I like something’ literally means ‘my insideness has risen’. When one is afraid, one will

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say wambung amanan inga mɨnggaykan ‘my insideness is running from me’. These are only a few Karawari examples showing how one can express one’s feelings in several different ways. Wambung is the centre through which one feels, thinks, recognizes, and in fact acts. How one does act is recognized in one’s appearance and in kay, the way one does things. “To have understanding means to be able to learn – to ‘bring inside’ – the way of the village [kay] and to follow this way” (Telban

1998: 60).

Wambung and Socio-Cultural Change

Every living being, either human or animal, either plant or stone, has arɨm ‘skin’, anggɨndarkwa ‘spirit’, and wambung ‘insideness, understanding’. Wambung and kay ‘way of doing things’ are inseparable as one generates the other. With both of them, Ambonwari people ‘make sense’ of their life. Being alive and awake means that one needs to open eyes and perceive the light, angguringa-, as I mentioned earlier. To stay alive, however, one needs ‘watchman of the light’, which is a literal translation of the Karawari term for a personal spirit, anggɨndarkwanar / anggɨndarkwanma / anggɨndarkwa (the last expression is used for a thing with no gender differentiation). Throughout my stay in the field I continuously discussed the issues around these main concepts and their relation to the senses. My two

‘sisters’ Augustina and Sapet, as well as Sapet’s husband Donald, were particularly eager to reflect upon the questions I posed about it. All three of them belong to the older generation and all three went through initiation. Donald spent several months in the men’s house and remembers many stories of the ancestors. Augustina and

Sapet spent several months in seclusion during their first menstruation ordeal. The skin of both of them was cut at the lower part of their back, marking how many

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months they spent in the so called manggay, a fenced enclosure made for a menstruating girl. I was very much interested how the social changes happening in the village modified the concepts of wambung and kay and what were people’s thoughts about them. How do the children become Ambonwari persons nowadays when there are no male or female initiation rituals anymore? In the following pages

I present a discussion between Donald and Augustina, reflecting upon the issues of

Christianity, access to money, and the effects they have on their present day lives and wambung of the young people.15 Donald begins his talk explaining how stories of the ancestors connect a person to the land:

As an Ambonwari person you have to know the story of the ancestors. If

you don’t know the story you have no ground [attachment to place] here.

The ‘speaking in tongues’ [of the charismatic enthusiasts] is just a recent

issue. I don’t know much about it. I know the story of the ancestors. If you

follow only the Bible, and don’t work on your land, don’t plant your fingers

into the ground, you are tarangu [in Tok Pisin ‘poor thing’]. The Bible stops

people from fighting, arguing, killing, that’s fine, but you must know the story

of the ancestors too and work on your land. If you work hard on your land,

you will get money. If you only pray, you won’t get it. God won’t give you

money. It’s just about praying... When you look at the village today... When

15 I recorded several discussions in regard of wambung throughout my fieldwork between December 2010 and December 2011. They were conducted mainly in Tok Pisin, sometimes in Karawari, recorded on Sony video camera and audio recorder and translated by me into English when I returned to Australia. Translations from Karawari to Tok Pisin were done in the village with Julias Sunggulmari, the village Elementary School teacher, and Borut Telban.

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you walk in the afternoon [when everyone is back from the sago forest,

gardens, and rivers] through the village you see how it has changed. I think,

this village has no kanambringgra [in Karawari ‘poor thing, poor person’].

That’s because everyone makes money. [Donald is laughing and repeats

the sentence]. We adopted the reform of ‘white people’ from Asian

countries, their way of life. Well, you want to do something [according to

their law], you go and usually you do it wrong. Error comes up, cross and

fight... Money, it’s a good thing, but it has also negative side. Money will

serve you, but many things about it are bad. Money will bring me into

troubles. Women and children walk around, and all are asking for money

calling out: ‘biscuits, biscuits, scones, scones’!

Augustina enters the discussion by describing the ‘effects’ of newly introduced food on the children’s bodies:

Yes, children want everything and parents are tired of them. They want to

eat only ‘flour’ [scones] and biscuits. Their blood will become yellow [like the

colour of deep fried bread scones occasionally made and sold in the

village], they will be fat with no strength.

On another occasion Donald explained:

Look at Soroni [15 year-old son of Augustina]. He does not have ‘tinktink’

yet [understanding in Tok Pisin, i.e. wambung]. His wambung is outside. If

he went to the men’s house, the older men would give him schooling and

he would change. What he hasn’t seen yet, he would see in the men’s

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house. Wambung would also change and he [Soroni] would learn all sorts

of things like that you can’t marry too young. He would be all right, sleeping

in the men’s house. Sago would be brought to him by other men, he

wouldn’t go outside. What he did wrong before he would stop doing it. Once

a boy enters the men’s house he becomes a big man. Look how it is

nowadays! There is no men’s house, custom has been abandoned, and

very young boys like Soroni already think about marriage. It wasn’t like that

before. What you were taught in the men’s house changed your wambung

and changed your kay [behaviour].

Augustina again talks about the changes in young people’s bodies and their ways of thinking:

We, in the age like Soroni is now, we did not have these kinds of thoughts

about marrying. We were too young. Girls had no breasts, boys had no

beard. Nowadays! They mature faster. At that time we were just children,

playing around. Once we had gone through initiation we changed. We were

fat [sign of good health and maturity] and ready to marry and have a family.

The change happened inside as well as outside. The whole village was

involved in finding the food for the newly initiated boys and girls. All were

involved. It was hard work requiring enormous organization.

A few days later Donald continued while thinking of the changes happening in the village and our continuous discussion about them:

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Well, we cannot say that the way of the ‘white man’ has destroyed

everything, but... The missionaries came. They inspected everything and

made us get rid of the things that weren’t good in the men’s house.

Everything had to go out. When Bob was still alive [Bob Kanjik, the Big man

of Ambonwari who died in 1999], the custom had not finished yet. He held it

in his hands. Nowadays, when you follow only the Bible, you don’t have the

story [past]. Once I went with Bob Bates [the owner and manager of

Karawari Lodge] to Mount Hagen [in the Highlands of PNG] to get a fridge

[for the lodge]. We sat next to each other in a small aeroplane. We were

really up there, in the blue sky. Bob said to me: ‘Put your hand outside.

What is there?’ I put my hand out and told him: ‘Well, I feel wind and also

it’s raining a bit.’ Bob said: ‘You see, this is the house of God. He belongs to

here and to us [‘white people’]. You [PNG people] have your own story. You

follow your path. This [blue sky, house of God] is our story, story of a white

man.’ The point here is about custom. There is good custom and bad

custom. One has to think of this. Nowadays, everyone goes to the church

because there is nothing else to do. Well, it’s O.K. It’s also a kind of reform.

If you would like to go back in time, bring the ‘culture kit’ [in Tok Pisin,

traditional practices in a package] back again, it would be hard. It would not

be good to bring the custom back. There was plenty of something bad too.

We [some of us] are still holding the custom in our hands. It can go into a

new reform too... Sometimes I go to church, sometimes I don’t. I am just

following the canoe [of incoming changes]. Nowadays, you cannot practice

custom of the past. All the time they are telling us about new reforms. All

the time something new comes up, a new change appears. For example,

the New Testament, new reading, new work... But we don’t get anything out

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of it. Before the catechists were bringing things for the communities, they

gave them to people. Nowadays they don’t. The big change is that money is

coming to the village from selling the rubber. Fathers and mothers, and

those who don’t go to the town are happy to get cash [in the village]. They

are proud that they can buy things from those who come from the town and

sell them. They are very happy. Wambung mɨndɨkian yandia kambro [‘He is

worried about these empty / worthless things’]. I will say: ‘I like this thing. I

will buy it and bring it to the house. The whole family will be happy that we

have something special like that. Everyone will be happy.’ On the other

hand, when I give my bag of rubber to someone to carry it to the town, he

will misuse the money for his own goods and I won’t see anything out of my

hard work. Wambung ama sɨkan mani mbɨnarin [‘I am worried about my

money’]. That’s the negative side of this new change. Wambung takes

many things inside.

Donald and Augustina observe what is going on in the village and they are not pleased with what they see. Young people marry too early before knowing anything about life. They think only about how to get things from the town, how to get hold of money. Donald perceives the Church as useless, as not providing people with a necessary skill for life in the village. They both praise initiation and first menstruation rituals as those occasions when the whole village was involved in making the young people healthy and ready for marriage. For Donald there are too many ‘reforms’ and those related to money make people greedy. They spend on useless things not only their own money but also money of those who entrust them with their bags of rubber. In the past, Donald says, wambung cared about the land and how to work on it. This was also their connection to the past. Now, wambung

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cares only about money and things coming from the town. There is no past but only the present.

When Wambung Dies

Wambung ‘understanding’, as well as kay ‘way of doing things’ (see Telban 1998), have always been reproduced through their progeny. Ambonwari life has always been oriented towards birth and reproduction. Children are the most valuable thing in people’s lives. Children through names, kinship terms, and social roles identified with their grandparents, are expected to sustain the lineage, clan, and society as a whole. Children are therefore the most precious beings. They are wambung

‘insideness’ of their parents. In one of our many discussions, Donald and his wife

Sapet only confirmed this.

Donald: “The firstborn son is your real wambung.”

Sapet: “You won’t forget if he dies. He is your wambung.”

Donald: “Wambung is life, because when one dies, the spirit goes out, becomes wundumbunar [spirit of the dead], and takes wambung away too. Spirit has wambung. When one dies, only the skin is left behind. That’s our life, the life of all men and women on this world.”

In April 2011 Donald’s and Sapet’s second born son Terrence died in a boat accident near the town of Madang in Morobe Province. The national Post-Courier newspaper also wrote about it (Plate 17). For the Ambonwari, however, it was not just an accident. The rumour started that Terrence had not been killed only by the propeller of an outboard motor during the time of collision, but by an additional blow

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with an axe on his head. The men who had caused the accident had been drunk when driving their boat from an island to Madang.

Plate 17: The national Post-Courier announcing the boat collision

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One of the reasons for this ‘murder’, people said, lied in Terrence’s wife’s connections with the drunken guys. I was told that her previous husband had also died under suspicious conditions. Coming from Manam Island, renowned for its sorcery, she did not have a good reputation in the eyes of the Ambonwari. She had two children with Terrence at the time of the accident. It was devastating news for

Sapet and Donald. We heard that other Ambonwari young men living in Lae and

Madang found the group of rascals who caused the collision and confiscated their boat. The responsible group paid bel kol (in Tok Pisin ‘cooling of belly’, the first portion of compensation) so the corpse could be transported to the village. Jack,

Augustina’s firstborn son and Terrence’s classificatory brother (MZS), who left the village thirteen years ago and lived in Lae, was planning to bring the body to where it belonged, home to the village. It was a big issue, not just for the Ambonwari, but for the whole Konmei River area in general. No one had brought a dead body from some other town than Wewak that had yet to be buried at home. It was a big thing for Augustina too as she, a widow, was living in very humiliating conditions since her husband had died in 1998 and her son had left the village. Jack, being the firstborn son, was supposed to take care of his mother as she did not marry again.

Over several weeks we tried to contact Jack and others who were helping him in his attempts to organize the transport of the corpse from the morgue in Madang to

Ambonwari. We went twice to Karawari Lodge and tried to ring them via wireless phone and mobile phones, catching a weak connection from a remote transmission tower. We had several misleading announcements by other villagers about the date of the plane’s arrival to the Karawari airstrip in Amboin. Once, several

Ambonwari men went to the bush, climbed the trees, tried to get wireless and mobile phone connection, and brought the news that on the next day we should be in Amboin waiting for the plane with the corpse (kambra arɨm, lit. ‘just skin, skin

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nothing’). We smeared white clay on our skin as a sign of mourning and went there, but no one came.

When we returned to the village, a rumour spread around that it was obviously

Terrence’s spirit (wundumbunar) who talked to the men over the phone and deliberately tricked us. The villagers were extremely excited about the necessity of bringing the corpse and the whole village was in chaos. Sapet and Donald covered with white clay cried most of the time. They were absolutely devastated and exhausted from all those who wanted to be involved in the transport of the corpse by a motor-canoe from the airstrip to the village, but could not do anything about it.

The collective excitement was overwhelming. Then a motor-canoe arrived, carrying four young Ambonwari men, who returned from Madang. Once the correct announcement finally reached us, the tension slightly weakened. We went to get the corpse (see Terrence Trilogy Part 01).

Plate 18: Listening to the ‘other side’ and arranging the arrival of the corpse © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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The plane was about an hour late. We noticed it flying high above, first too far south and then too far north. After the plane finally landed, Jack told us that

Terrence’s spirit first redirected the plane to fly above the whole Karawari-speaking area and then return back to the Amboin airstrip. According to the onlookers the spirit of Terrence was fully in control and took advantage of the unskilled pilot who had never flown to this area before. In addition to the boat with Terrence’s parents, two large motor canoes full of Ambonwari men came to the airstrip. Besides those from Ambonwari, many people from nearby villages also came to see the arrival of the plane. The men put the coffin into the boat. Those who went with the coffin were Sapet, Donald, Augustina, Jeffrey (Terrence’s older brother), Jack, Terrence’s wife with two children, and her sister.

Plate 19: The popular Xcess wireless phone distributed by Telikom PNG © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Sapet and Donald were finally relieved from waiting. As can be seen and heard in

Terrence Trilogy Part 01, Sapet repeats in her sorrowful chanting “wambung wambung, finally we can talk to each other.” In one moment Donald asks: “Did you

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need to go to the town? Now you see; you went there to die.” When the coffin arrived to the village, one could hardly move in the crowd. When observing Sapet mourning over the corpse, we see the tactility with which she expresses her grief.

The tapping of a plastic water bottle symbolically shows Terrence’s status of somebody who lived in a town. The sound of tapping is like beating the hand-drum.

The coffin is also a ‘wall’ between the dead son and his mourning mother.

Everyone wanted to touch the coffin and see Terrence’s corpse. There were also those who had distanced themselves and did not come to the shore when the body had arrived. Terrence’s away (mother’s brother) Samuel, Sapet’s only brother, for example, later explained that it was too heart-breaking for him to be there at that moment. Once the coffin reached the house of Terrence’s parents, it was carried around to greet all the members in the area of the Wallaby clan to which Terrence belonged, visiting the places where he had played as a child. Then the coffin was put down and the cover was taken off. Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the corpse.

Donald’s sisters and Terrence’s ‘mothers’ sat near the coffin touching and crying over the corpse. These women had fed him, celebrated his first achievements, and made him grow by their continuous care. It was extremely important for all the closest relatives to see the corpse and to touch it. They removed the bandage from his wound to see the cuts at the back of his head. The cuts only confirmed people’s conviction that he had been murdered.

That same night the coffin was put outside near Donald’s house on a waterproof canvas used for covering the cargo when travelling with the motor-canoe on the

Sepik River. The neon lamps arranged around the place were on, running on a generator. They kept people awake. It seemed that the whole village gathered there. Most of the people stayed with the corpse throughout the night (see

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Terrence Trilogy Part 02). On the next morning the coffin was put into the house.

Donald and Sapet decided to keep the coffin one more night in the house and cry over the corpse. This second night a group of women came to the house and performed a kurang ceremony. This ritual celebration, better known as naven among the Iatmul people (Bateson 1958 [1936]; Vávrová 2008), is performed after significant achievements of men and women. Terrence went far away to a ‘big town’ of Madang and this, regardless that he was dead, had to be acknowledged, if not fully celebrated, upon his first return to the village. The women from his maternal Crocodile-1 clan acted as his ‘mothers’ and the women from his paternal

Wallaby clan acted as his ‘fathers’. They brought with them tools, such as, spears, fishing baskets, tools for processing sago and baskets to carry the sago. All these women, who danced around the coffin, were from the classificatory kin representing the parents, Donald and Sapet.16 The last ceremony, before the actual burial took place in the early morning on the third day, was Terrence’s final farewell. When the carriers lifted the coffin, the spirit of Terrence guided them from one person to another pushing them out of the house telling them in this way to stop mourning. Some refused to leave and they were gathered at one spot at the back of the house. Terrence’s spirit bid farewell for the last time to his closest kin

(see Terrence Trilogy Part 03). The men who carried the coffin around, stopped at one person after another giving them time to say goodbye to Terrence. His away

‘mother’s brother’ Samuel was also there in the role of his ‘mother’. With a deep grief he chanted: “We will be here [We survived you, you died]. What will we tell you? [Crying...] I will make a decision this afternoon and talk to all of them about your son. He will stay here with us [in the village], he won’t go away.” The corpse

16 See Slideshow 03 with MP3 sound file on the accompanying DVD: Kurang for Terrence or follow the link.

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was finally brought outside and buried in kawara, the small resting house of Donald and Sapet. In the absence of the men’s house, Donald called his resting house by its name, Awriman. They said that they want to keep Terrence close to them and together with the ancestors of his clan. After all this, I asked Donald about the mourning period and divination ritual which in the past revealed the cause of death and marked the number of pigs which should be distributed in order to end the mourning period (see Telban 2001 for post-mortem divination in Ambonwari).

Donald said that he was talking to Terrence’s spirit in person when he sat alone in the resting house at night and was told to catch, kill and distribute eight pigs. After the funeral Terrence’s wife and children stayed in the village for some months.

Some of the villagers talked about buying the two children from her and keeping them in the village. In patrilineal Ambonwari society, the children belong to the father’s clan. They wanted to keep the son who would inherit Terrence’s land and sustain the lineage and the clan in the village. The mother, however, did not agree with this and soon left the village together with her two children. They, however, agreed to meet in Madang again, request compensation for the murder, and if necessary, go to the official court. Later on, the son might return to the village. The people, generally, do not rush making their decisions. The mourning period can last even over a period of several years. In the end it often happens that many things never get fully resolved, compensated, or completed.

With this case study, I intended to show the importance of seeing and touching the skin-body of a person for the last time before the burial, and how one’s insideness embodies and is embodied in one’s children. The death of a child can therefore be equated with annihilation of a parent’s wambung. For the Ambonwari, it was important to see the scars on Terrence’s head which indicated the killing. In the

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three accompanying videos, Terrence Trilogy, we can observe that some of the old customary practices, which are part of the memorial service, are still relevant for the present day villagers. These practices are performed regardless of the Catholic charismatic movement’s persistent intentions towards abandoning them. The practices which are hardest to abolish are those related to their children, either the living or the dead. The camera also facilitated certain expressions to be shown and activities performed. For Donald, as he told me afterwards, it was an honour to have the entire process recorded. The sorrow felt and expressed by Terrence’s

‘mothers’, ‘fathers’ and ‘brothers’ was devastating. We could notice that the mobile phones were incorporated into the whole event. They were a reflection of the urban life to which Terrence belonged. Although there is no mobile phone network around, some individuals have already purchased phones and used them as cameras. There was no reading of the Bible or mass organized in the village church.

It is at the moment of negation of existence when one can better understand how wambung and arɨm are closely connected. Moreover, as the videos have shown, the skin of a dead person is tightly interwoven with many other ‘skins’. As wambung of the mourners cannot be seen, it can only be revealed through careful observation of people’s expressions and doings. These expressions and doings influence the sensory experience of the viewers and penetrate their wambung in a way which, as the Ambonwari say, is closer to the ‘truth’ than any verbal or written account could achieve. This ‘truth’ then allows simultaneity of different perspectives and the possibility of changing them. Thus, while the recorded material on the one hand provides concrete, almost tangible, connection to the event and people of the past, it remains at the same time open to new perceptions and explanations.

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Although the corpse is without the spirit, the spirit is still floating around and communicating with the living. Such a communication in both visual and auditory terms, with signs and sounds, shows the mourners that the spirit of the dead has not yet left the village. When anggɨndarkwanar ‘personal spirit, watchman of the light’ becomes wundumbunar ‘spirit of the dead’ the communication becomes harder and requires certain experience and knowledge in order to understand particular signs and sounds as we will see in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER Four: Ethnography of Communication

Face and Body in Image and Talk

Saria ‘face’ is not only a part of a human body, but also the front of a house or a carved mask of a spirit. It is an appearance that communicates with the world around it. The face, in Ambonwari, is the most observed part of a human body. It is looked at, talked about, admired or disliked. Together with the eyes, it is the most expressive, communicative part of the body. While one’s appearance as shown on the face of a person reflects one’s individuality, passage of time, and life experiences, the eyes reveal inner feelings, and observe and are observed in social interactions. “The face is also the site of expression, signalling emotional states and the recognition of others. It is where we look for signs of intelligence and comprehension. It is the theatre of the body, registering the inner life of its owner in biologically and culturally predetermined ways” writes David MacDougall in connection to film-experience and the faces we see in a film (1998: 51). He says that “[w]ithout the human face, much of what matters to us in films would vanish”

(ibid.). We can say the same about the photography. Just think of the images you have seen, those which stayed the most imprinted in your memory. How many of them are of human faces? How many are connected to human expressions and doings? Visual anthropology, as well as much of the photographic and documentary art, is based on human expressions, people’s doings, and human

‘extensions’ (tools, crafts, dwelling spaces, or traces of human influence). Visual anthropologists portray people’s lives and make these lives visible to others. Unlike

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the image, text does not embody and does not have face or appearance to be looked at. It is the people and their faces that make the visual history. The visual history is a mixture of one’s expression and another’s perception, of socio-cultural milieu of the perceiver and the one of the perceived. This is characteristic of an ethnographic film. Dai Vaughan, a documentary filmmaker, wrote it precisely in this sense stating:

Every anthropological film, insofar as it relies for its comprehension upon

the competencies of our own culture yet conceals this fact behind the

referential nature of the photographic image, is as much about our own

society as about that of its subjects. That which is an inflexion of our own

experience is inevitably also an interpretation of it. Parallels do not have to

be spelled out. They are spelled in (1999: 116).

Thus, when one stands in front of a house in Ambonwari, one sees a face – the front of the house. When the doors are shut – its mouth is shut. One does not enter the house. No one is in there or those inside do not want to be disturbed. When people sit on the steps, when children are playing around, and one hears laughing from the inside, one can greet those inside and ask them for a betel nut.

The big mask at the front and the back of the church, previously hung on the men’s house, is called face, saria. It represents a female spirit wunduma. It is a good spirit of a dead woman and, as I explain below, it keeps its importance for the people.

Telban writes:

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The big wunduma mask becomes a female spirit following the ritual

installation of a stone, which is the spirit’s Heart [wambung], behind the

mask. Such rituals are performed whenever the mask, which is the spirit’s

arɨm (skin), needs to be replaced. When, fifty or so years ago, the

Ambonwari fought their enemies (mostly Imanmeri), they painted their

bodies to resemble wunduma-nga (i.e. female spirits). They say that

wundumanga came into their bodies and helped them during the fight

(1998: 168).

The design of this female spirit, the face, the appearance, was carved on slit- drums, spirit-crocodiles, shields and posts in the men’s house. People painted their faces in the pattern of wunduma, before joining all-night singing and dancing.

Plate 20: Wunduma © Dominic Bob 2011

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Today, one can see the carved wunduma on the prows of canoes, paddles or slit- drums. In my bag I also carry around one little wunduma which was carved by my

‘brother’ Daniel Akwi and given to me when I was leaving the village at the end of my fieldwork. The female spirits protect and support not just an individual person, but also their houses and the whole village. Two characteristics on the wunduma’s face can be immediately noticed. Her opened mouth with a tongue sticking out, warning all those who would like to harm the place, and her protruding eyes constantly watching the place, making sure that everything is all right. Once the mask was put on a men’s house, it strengthened both the buildings and the people, and protected all the houses and the family members of its clan and those who were associated with it. Nowadays, having its place under the roof at the front and at the back of the church, it protects all the villagers. It is a guardian of the life in the village. While all carved sakɨnggar ‘male bush spirits’ from the men’s house, who assisted in male initiation and fights with the Ambonwari neighbours, were in

2003 taken to the forest and left there to decay, wunduma ‘spirit of a dead woman’ was transferred to the village church. Being seen as a kind of a motherly figure, unconditionally caring for her ‘children’, the mask preserved its importance, and was not abandoned. This was also due to the fact that the mask, hanging at the front and the back of their men’s houses, has always been exposed to the eyes of everyone, including women and children.

For many people around the world, faces – including those depicted on the masks like wunduma mentioned above – are generally of extreme importance. The

Ambonwari often express their wish to see the faces of close relatives and friends before they die. They also want to keep a photograph of the one who died. They do not want to see the faces of those who have wronged them or made them angry. A

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face, as people say, can be dry, strong, short or long, but also heavy, high or joyful.

Exaggerations of facial details are used in both casual observations (perceived as good) and disputes (perceived as bad). Expressions telling that one has ears like mushrooms, hanging lips, stinking eyes, or big noses like the snout of a pig, are all used for scolding or insult. Observations such as a sharp nose, wide opened ears or good eyes, are used to praise someone (see Appendix 4 for different facial descriptions in disputes and casual observations). During my recordings of everyday interactions it often happened that Augustina and her daughter Nazeria had a fierce argument. It usually escalated in such a way that one of them left the house for some hours or even the entire day. In the evening, however, they met and ate together again. If the argument had not been solved it could have led to the sickness of one of the family members as I mentioned earlier in the case of Bapra’s son Bradly. When I asked Augustina why she so often gets angry with Nazeria, more than with Bapra, I was usually briefly told about the reason behind their argument. What most annoyed Augustina, over and over again, were Nazeria’s repetitive accusations and the choice of her vocabulary. She was often describing

Augustina’s body, her nose, eyes, lips and face in general, in a very bad manner.

Describing it as used in Tok Pisin in such a context, is not something nice and positive, but the worst possible verbal humiliation. In the Karawari language people use the word wandɨmasi- which is best explained by ‘talk badly about somebody by saying how somebody looks like’ or ‘not like somebody or something’ or ‘make somebody ashamed with bad decorative talk’. It is mariawk maman ‘bad talk, swearing’. Using such expressions is showing deep resentment and having no respect for another person. Augustina said that Nazeria is a very talkative person, a good speaker, and could defend the family in many cases when they were abused by outsiders. If she could only think of the language she uses. Augustina

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then continued by explaining what a ‘sharp nose’ (ipɨn wananing) person means.

She said that such a person does not only look good with a nice face and healthy skin, but also works a lot and lives a good and honest life with his or her family.

Moreover, somebody described in such a way is also a good person, has good manners, and people like them. This shows that the external appearance is equated with the internal character. Description of someone’s saria ‘face’, and arɨm

‘skin’ in general, reflects and reveals their wambung ‘insideness’ at least from the perspective of an observer. In disputes with Nazeria the members of the house used an expression of her meaning a long and bony chin, indicating that she is angry all the time and shouting at others with swearwords, which makes her chin look cranky. One who looks good, radiates good energy, is also a generous and respectable person. One’s character is expressed and judged through one’s facial expressions, practices, behaviour and speech. All these aspects are intermingling with the social and interpersonal relationships. Thus, through others we can see ourselves as relationships are never one-sided. The reactions of others mirror our activities and vice versa. The Ambonwari context arɨm ‘skin’ and kay ‘way of doing things’ show what one’s wambung is about. Generally, as Telban writes, “[t]o be good mainly means that one is generous (warimbarar) while to be bad mainly shows that one is stingy (karɨsɨkɨn)” (2002: 8). An important factor in judgement of one’s goodness is sharing the food and things with others. This also brings a smile to people’s faces. Wurumung- ‘laugh, play, tease’ denotes a relaxing mood without any hidden thoughts and grudges and one who does things correctly, shares with others, does not get easily angry, does not cheat on his or her partner, and is strong and firm in decisions. The Ambonwari do not want to see a person with a serious ‘dry face’ (saria akukusakia) or ‘angry face‘ (yiprɨkɨm maman ‘bad snout, bad lips and nose’). They do not have a high regard for someone who has ‘no

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mouth’ (anduk kanar / anduk kanma), who does not speak and communicate much, or who does not listen and disobeys well meant advice (kwandɨkas kanar / kwandɨkas kanma, lit. ‘one with no ears’).

It is not only in Ambonwari, that the body parts are used when talking about a character or behaviour of a person, or when applying different directional expressions in orientation. Certain cognitive linguists, those who want to bridge language, culture, and cognition in particular, emphasize the importance of culture in the perception of body and related tropes (Maalej and Yu 2011). Sophia

Marmaridou, for example, writes about the face (prosopo) in the Modern Greek language. In her examples, ‘the hotel sees the sea’ and it can also ‘see the square’

(2011: 27). The orientation of eyesight in her case is related to the front of the head, i.e. the eyes on the face. The mouth and speech, also placed on the face and uttered from the face, are discussed by Nissen (2011: 71-92). He compares examples from the Danish, English and Spanish languages saying that in all three languages the ‘cruel, cheerful or sensual mouth’ expresses the person’s personality (Nissen 2011: 89). In Ambonwari, one can say that somebody has a mouth like the opening – also called ‘mouth’ – on a slit-drum, anduk minak yimbung mɨnamban ’his/her mouth is like the one of a slit-drum’. This means that one is very loud and when arguing with someone, all the villagers will hear him/her when shouting. A person with yipɨmbas kamiambasan ‘wide open lips’ talks a lot, mainly about things which are totally irrelevant to the present situation. People will say that his/her mouth is opened like a basket or a string net for fishing. Occhi writes that in

Japan people say that a person who is quick to notice something has a ‘clever eye’, while a bleary-eyed person has a ‘rotten-eye’; one can also have large and scary eyes like an owl (2011: 175, 176, 181). He also says that for the Japanese to

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recognize someone’s emotions they look into one’s eyes, because ‘the eye says as much as the mouth’ and ‘the eyes are the mirror of the heart’ (Occhi 2011: 189). An

Ambonwari person can have the eyes of a cassowary, sambɨs awa minakia, which means that one has very big eyes but does not really see well and properly. When one says in a dispute to somebody that he or she has eye balls of a black possum, yaka minakɨnggi nggurunggi, one is implicitly telling the other person that they are stupid and do not see anything. To have the eagle’s eyes means that one can spot a small thing from afar. One has ‘sharp’ eyes.

Plate 21, from left: Sambɨs kamapian 'big open eyes', yipɨmbas kambɨnɨnggi 'big heavy thick lips', kwandɨkas yarakɨsan 'ears like mushrooms', anduk kamandiakɨkɨn 'wide open mouth' © Pressley Julias 2011

All these examples clearly show how the environment and culture provide a specific background for verbal expressions and how culturally specific observations become mirrored in the use of people’s language. The above examples also show how much emphasis is put on external appearance and how otherwise invisible inner thoughts are expressed in visible behaviour and manners. People make use

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of the penetrating look wanting to break through the external skin into the interior of a person and to understand what one thinks and feels. As wambung ‘insidensess’ communicates with the external arɨm ‘skin’, many internal thoughts and feelings become visible on the skin. What skin perceives, of course, is then also internalized and understood with one’s wambung. It is quite common in PNG to say to an onlooker yu no ken lukluk strong long mi ‘don’t look strong at me’, in Tok

Pisin, as to goggle with wide staring eyes is regarded as disconcerting and not polite. But how is this expressed in Karawari? To observe someone with a long steady look, which can be just a gaze out of curiosity or the look of seduction, would be expressed by sanggwa-maman-kay- ‘look-bad-stay’. Such a look is well known to produce embarrassment and shame and is regarded as something which should be controlled. Only children are allowed to stare and are then scolded by adults saying that they are like midges, that their eyes are actually becoming like those things which they eat: betel nuts, sago grubs, or biscuits.

A relationship between verbal expression and visual appearance has been, for example, discussed also by John Collier in his study of the Navajo people.

Although put in questionable and unfounded binary opposition between Us and

Them, it nevertheless emphasises the precedence of vision in people’s perception of ‘truth’, something I have discussed in a previous chapter. Collier wrote:

The auditory is coded language that can directly express mood which is

reinforced by the verbal signals of the listener. With discipline the eyes

perceive the factual shapes of realism, but the ear must translate because

every language is a set of abstract symbols. Regardless of this evident

epistemology, Western people reverse this order and perceive the written

word as reality and visual imagery as impression. Navajo observers, by

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projective test, see photographs as literal information and language as

coded interpretation. If you do not know this you can wholly misinterpret the

Navajo message (Collier and Collier 1986 [1967]: xv).

Plate 22, from left: blocked nose, hanging lips, blocked ears © Pressley Julias 2011

In an indirect language of a painting, carving, body decoration, or in nonverbal communication of hands and faces, the expression can encompass more than the words and their meaning. Nonverbal communication expresses emotions (Ekman

1980, Enfield 2001), moods, desires, agreement or disagreement, and ultimately the relationship between the subjects. The Ambonwari often use their eyes to make a sign of agreement without saying anything. There can be silence, but the face still

‘talks’. Instead of saying “yes”, people lift both of their eyebrows. It is a common gesture made by the adults as well as children. The reason for this is often not to be heard (and subsequently seen) by those who are bypassing. It is a gesture which usually accompanies the speech. But it also expresses the mood of the speaker and relationship to the pointed subjects.

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Signs and Sounds

The Ambonwari have a large number of visual and auditory signs, which are used for communication over longer distances or during the absence of another person

(i.e. when they are in hospital or live in a town for a long time). These include clans’ visual signs (mambɨr), omens specific to their environment (jumping fish, singing birds, cracking of a bark floor, or rocking canoes), dreams and body itches with particular meanings, or slit-drum signals.

Communication with God

Nowadays, a few Ambonwari use mobile phones to communicate with the spirits of the dead (Telban and Vávrová 2014, forthcoming). I would like here to emphasize that the Ambonwari have no mobile phone reception yet. Digicel Company is planning to build a tower in the area and provide the necessary network. However, the phones as well as the old broken cameras, which some people own, are mainly used to show their owners’ status and power, albeit momentarily. Some individuals appropriated the practice of dialling phone numbers to contact God. This practice is additional to Bible readings, and prayers and trances, which is a new way of communicating with God closely connected to the arrival of the Catholic charismatic movement to the village in 1994. Robin, the first Catholic charismatic leader in Ambonwari, for example, has a private number which he dials in his mind each time he is in need of advice from God. Apparently, as Robin said in 2011,

God is testing the villagers in their strength to resist all the new things coming to the village. Those who hold important positions in either the orthodox Catholic

Church or the Catholic charismatic movement should be modest and compassionate. Robin explained to me:

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The leader has to have his head down. He should look with his eyes, listen

to the people, and not get involved in a fight or a drinking session. If you

sincerely believe in God and follow his steps, he will give you whatever you

want. The blessing you ask for will be given to you easily and you will in

return of his gift be able to help the community... Jesus belongs to your

country [‘white people’s country]. He did not fight when he was a prophet.

The Bible says that precisely. He just walked and talked to people. He was

not busy with the women. He did not fight. He walked the right way.

Robin went on to say that it was because of contemporary charismatic leaders and their behaviour that many Ambonwari people had died, that the community was not getting blessings from God. He was explicitly referring to their drinking, playing cards, and not organizing regular praying events. “The blessing for the Ambonwari is on and off”, said Robin. On the other hand, people have cash money in their pockets. They can buy petrol for more frequent travels on the rivers and they are not hungry. They, as Robin stated, should not forget to thank God for all the wealth coming to them and pray every day as they did when they were poor and hungry.

The secret number which Robin received from God is imaginatively drawn on his hand.

I got this present from God to communicate with him. I saw it like on the

video in my dream. I got it straight in my dreaming prophecy. It was a white

man who gave me this present, not a black man. They have many more

secrets to give, but they did not want to show all of them yet. When I write

the number on my hand, my fingers start to move. My blood pumps and I

get power. If I put my hand on the place that you feel pain, I will heal you. I

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pull the pain out of you. Next day you will be fine. I do the same to my

children and also to myself. We are not sick.17

Plate 23: Pentecostal Sunday © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Robin keeps the number as his personal secret and does not want it to be revealed to other people. One of the Ambonwari women, Maggie, was suffering from a long- term tuberculosis which had already affected her spine and joints. She could not walk anymore. All the prayers were insufficient. Thus Robin ‘dialled’ his number

21... on the palm of his hand. When his hand began to shake he knew that he was connected to God. He asked God to help him. He described the problem, which he was trying to solve. God then looked at the sick person and transmitted his healing energy through Robin onto a stick that Robin had given to Maggie so that she could exercise by walking. “This stick, which I have given her, has 100% power.

17 Discussion with Robin was recorded in Tok Pisin on 13 June 2011 and translated by me in 2012.

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We call it simply 100%. The full power will make Maggie walk to the creek and bath”. On the day of celebrating Pentecostal Sunday (12 June 2011), Maggie walked to the village church with support of the stick and Robin. All those who witnessed Maggie walking, were convinced that Robin was a true healer and had sufficient power to solve the complicated and long lasting suffering of Maggie. After the church mass Maggie collapsed in front of the church saying that she was overwhelmed by the power of the Holy Spirit. It was physically exhausting. Soon after she regained her strength, her husband brought her to the hospital in

Angoram where she undertook treatment for medical tuberculosis.

Plate 24: Maggie collapsed in front of St. Steven church in Ambonwari © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Communication with the Dead Children and Bush Spirits

It is in people’s dreams that their personal spirits, i.e. their anggɨndarkwi ‘spirits, watchmen of the light’, travel to different places. One of my ‘sisters’, Alexia, told me about her dream in 2008 and meeting her dead son: “He came to take me for a

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drive in his car to the place where he lives now. He was wearing jeans, shirt, socks and shoes. There was watch on his wrist. He came up from the ground.” Alexia got scared and even though it was her son who was inviting her to see his new place, she, knowing that he is inviting her to the place of the dead, rejected the offer.

“Another time, I have to go now”, Alexia said to him. Later on in 2011, I asked her if her son had appeared in her dreams again. He did not. Robin had a similar experience in his dreams. He almost went to the underground too, but God stopped him. Robin explained his dream as follows:

First I saw a step going down. When I got closer, I saw many steps leading

into the underground. I started to follow them when a voice called me: ‘Hey!’

I looked down and saw all the lights which are under the ground. I saw cars

rushing back and forth, aeroplanes taking off and landing. The voice,

however, called me back on the ground: ‘You come here!’ It was God who

called me back. He did not want me to go to the underground yet. This

place I saw in my dream is a place where all the dead ones live.18

Alexia was equally puzzled by the place she had seen in her dream. We had several discussions about life in the underground, but we have never reached an answer to how it could be called. The place seen in the dreams could be equally

Heaven as it could be Hell. Both intermingle with wishes, emotions, beliefs, and problems to be faced in an unknown territory with familiar spirits of the dead relatives. Images seen in dreams, however, confirm the existence of this bright world under the ground. The Ambonwari say that during sleep one becomes only a

‘skin’. The spirit of life, which is inside the body when the person is awake, moves

18 See footnote 17.

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out and travels. If the spirit does not return back to the body, as I mentioned earlier, the person dies and the anggɨndarkwanar / anggɨndarkwanma ‘spirit of a living person’ becomes wunduma or wundumbunar ‘spirit of a dead person’. Thus people, things, and happenings in dreams are images of what is going on elsewhere and what awaits one in the future. For the Ambonwari, they are as real as those encountered in an awaken state.

Communication with the spirits has a long history for the Ambonwari. Many practices have been abandoned over the years while some are still occasionally used. One of the latter is kay wurukrarin or in English ‘rocking canoe’. This practice used to be a traditional way of asking the spirit of the land or/and the creek if one was going to catch fish or kill a pig (see video-clip Kay Wurukrarin ‘Rocking

Canoe’). When the canoe in which one was sitting did not rock at all, it provided a negative answer: ‘I won’t catch any fish here’ or ‘I won’t be successful in my hunt’.

If the canoe rocked twice from side to side, it meant ‘Yes, I will catch something’.

The men, who went hunting, people say, were usually successful after receiving a positive answer. When one asked the spirit about something else, for example, about an absent person, a sign soon arrived about the person’s return. Nowadays, as Augustina said: “We have a phone which often misleads us and we catch nothing.” What Augustina meant was that only some people have the numbers of

God and the spirits of the dead, and that the spirits often mislead the people who think that they got connected to a particular person while in reality it was only the spirits who made them believe so. With the use of new technologies, a mobile phone in particular, communication entered a new era of comprehending and explaining a diversity of sounds and signs. This is especially so in the area without a mobile phone network. People get puzzled and suspicious as there are infinite

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possibilities for finding the invisible reality behind the visible world and explaining the error. One could say that the most powerful and knowledgeable world actually exists in the invisible domain while everything that materializes in the visible world of the people is just bits and pieces of that reality. These casual appearances in the material world are thus more like the signs indicating the invisible reality and pertaining to truth which remain constantly hidden from the people.

Visual and Aural Signs

Through the visual signs and observation of the environment the Ambonwari can easily recognize that someone was already at a particular place, where they have just arrived. For example, the foam on the water tells me that someone has just paddled by and I will choose a different path and different place where I will put my fishing net. Another example: if a morning dew has disappeared from the grass on the path to my garden, while it is still everywhere around, I will immediately know that someone is in my garden or has just walked through it. One can also recognize whose steps are imprinted on the ground. People know each other and it is usually a particular group of people who visit the same garden, sago forest, or a fishing area every day. Thus, while a stranger will be ignorant of many things, they will recognize the presence of a stranger. For an ethnographer the participation in daily activities thus becomes a necessary task leading to embodiment and understanding of the environment in which people’s culture is embedded. One needs a substantial time to learn, through experience, the many signs and the ways of communicating in order to be properly attuned to the life in the village and its surroundings.

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Another group of signs, which are not man-made but exist through the intimate relationship between the people, their culture and their environment, are omens

(see Appendix 5). These signs, both visual and aural, are: animals, birds in particular, seen and heard during the day or night and in the dreams; body itches and other reactions of the skin-body; and observation of changes in nearby surroundings. The majority of the villagers recognize and follow these signs. The signs are based on traditional lore, people’s experiences and daily habits. For example, if I sneeze excessively, if the palm of my hand is itchy, or if I hear whistling in my ears, people will say that someone who is far away is calling or thinking about me. It can also mean that somebody whom I do not expect will arrive, that I will get a letter, or that something will be there in the house waiting for me when I return. One’s body is the first indicator of news, a change, or a trouble.

When I am on a hunt for a pig, for example, and I kill a possum without much effort straight at the beginning of my walkabout, I shall go no further. I will not continue with hunting that day. It was too easy to get the possum. This was a warning sign telling me that something bad could happen to me or my close relatives or that I would not kill any pigs. As people say, one piece of meat is enough. This example illustrates the attitude people have towards their environment and how they carefully observe what is happening around them whenever pursuing a particular practice.

People use visual signs to communicate with each other. Mambɨr is a sign made out of particular leaves and used in certain situations to mark the path, announce someone’s death, deliver goods, or simply leave a message for one’s relatives. For example, once while we travelled on the Konmei Creek in a motor canoe we noticed a floating canoe. As canoes often float away after a heavy rain, we wanted

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to catch it and tie it to a nearby tree so that the owner would not search for it further downriver. However, we noticed mambɨr made of leaves in the middle of the canoe and immediately knew that somebody deliberately sent it downriver and that somebody else was expecting it. We concluded that those upriver most probably borrowed a canoe from those downriver and were now returning it. When a person sees such a sign he or she usually knows to which clan the sign belongs. They have to know the context and the people involved in order to know the actual person who placed the sign on a particular spot. The major Ambonwari clans have their own visual signs with their own names, while smaller clans, which were adopted into the bigger ones, use the signs of their hosts (see Appendix 6 with the

Plates 25-34 of each clan’s mambɨr). The signs are usually made from the leaves of a betel nut palm, rattan, coconut palm or edible greens. A clan sign can be used, for example, when a man borrows someone else’s paddle or canoe and leaves the sign which will tell the owner that his paddle or canoe was borrowed by a relative and not stolen. In the past, when the Ambonwari were still fighting with their neighbours and were forming alliances with other groups and other villages these signs were placed on the paths together with ginger or a cassowary bone indicating that a fight will take place in a particular direction.

The signs can also be combined. If a man from the Crocodile clan goes on a not too well known path into the sago forest, and expects his wife from the Wallaby clan to follow him some time later, he can leave a double sign for her to find the way. He will put first the mambi sign of his clan and will place at its back the leaves of simbiawi greens, the sign of the Wallaby clan. The combined sign will visually mean that the man from the Crocodile clan is at the front and his wife from the

Wallaby clan is coming behind. As people say, the sign shows that she ‘sits’ on her

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husband. If she were to go first and her husband would later follow her, she would put simbiawi leaves first and the sign of her husband’s Crocodile clan at the back. If the husband and wife went together to the sago forest and would like to tell others where to go, they would put on the path the sign of the Crocodile clan first and on the top of it and across it the sign of the Wallaby clan. Generally speaking the signs of parents or husbands are put under the signs of children and wives. In case that a man from the Crocodile clan did not find the proper leaves for his sign he could even use the leaves of his wife. He would need to tear off bits from some leaves just as he does with the leaves of a rattan.

Plate 35: Mambɨr at Maramun Creek prohibiting people to park their canoes at this place © Daniela Vávrová 2011

A different kind of a sign, although also called mambɨr, is to tie the leaves on a palm or put them on the ground to stop people from climbing the coconut and betel nut palms (and stealing the nuts), or entering a particular path (because those who

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put the sign went into other direction), or accessing the creek (because those who put the sign there plan to fish there by poisoning the creek very soon). These signs, which communicate prohibition, are generally recognized by every villager (see

Plates 35 and 36). I witnessed several times how people disregarded prohibitions and as a consequence, as people quickly pointed out, they got sick. On one such occasion a man went to the sago forest and cut a sago palm at the place where the owner had previously put a taboo sign. The man did not respect the sign which clearly indicated prohibition and was punished by getting sick. It is because of the ownership and access to resources by different kin members that the signs are put on certain places. Each palm, tree, or a creek belongs to someone, to particular individual, lineage and clan, and one always needs to discuss the matter with the owners whenever going to someone else’s bush.

Plate 36: Mambɨr on a coconut palm prohibiting people to climb and take coconuts © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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Another type of signs is used for invitation, arranging of a meeting or sending a message, and is called mamɨnɨng ‘mark, message’. In Tok Pisin they call it tanget, which is also the name of a Cordyline plant. It is often its leaf on which knots were made. Thus, the message could also be called kɨnɨnggi ‘knots’. If there is only a single knot on the leaf sent between two groups or individuals it means that everything is fine and that they should follow the procedures as agreed before.

Many knots mark the nights which should pass before the two parties will meet.

Every morning one knot is untied. When people untie the last knot it means that the visitors will arrive or that the meeting will start on that day. One directional message is also called mamɨnɨng. A knot which is not tight on a Cordyline leaf usually accompanies a verbal message or simply reminds the other party of the previous agreement. One can put a piece of banana leaf or newspaper into a knot telling the other side to send him or her some tobacco (tobacco used to be rolled into banana leaves and is nowadays rolled in newspaper). In the same way a betel nut husk, betel pepper leaf or a small shell can be tied with a leaf and sent as a message, telling the receiver that one is in need of betel nuts, betel pepper or lime.

People say that a loop of a knot into which something is put actually represents an open mouth explicitly showing what a person is hungry about. Such a message usually goes to a classificatory brother-in-law or sister-in-law who lives in another village. A visible sign thus conveys an invisible realm understood by the people attuned to the physical and cultural environment, which they continually recreate.

Visible and Invisible

Things that were in the past hidden in the men’s houses and were strictly prohibited to be seen by women and children do not exist anymore. In 2003, nine years after the arrival of the Catholic charismatic movement in December 1994, the

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spirit-crocodiles, flutes, slit-drums and carved posts were put outside for everybody to see them and then were taken to the forest to decay. The men’s houses were either destroyed or changed into recreational houses accessible to everyone.

Nowadays, everything should be ‘ples klia’ (at an open space, in Tok Pisin).19 To hide or make things inaccessible is considered an insult. Desire, jealousy and resentment are openly shown. More things, more looks, more craving to possess.

Everyone would like to have all those things that the other one has, saying: amangok ‘me too’. Such an attitude creates contradictions when talking (everything should be ‘ples klia’) but is negated by the practice of hiding things. People’s houses are usually very empty. Bags full of things are hanging on the walls, or things are hidden in the boxes and placed under the roof. Unless the majority of the people in the village have the same thing, it needs to be hidden, not to catch and seduce the eyes of others. To give a person something special in front of others – if this is not an organized event – is to humiliate the receiver as well as the onlookers. The people often come at night to get those things, which were brought to the village on their request. Although they will still be seen, the darkness will cover their embarrassment and soften the look of the watchers. Nowadays, the knowledge should be also accessible to everyone. It is visibility and accessibility which count. For example, not anyone can receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. But everyone can try for it. It is not anyone who can heal the sick ones and it is not whoever who brings wealth to the community. It is wambung or agency of

19 In the Karawari language the verb denoting something that is clearly visible is sapuka- ‘stay/be at open and clear place’, while its denial denotes hiding kasapuka- ‘hide’. An open place, visible area or ‘ples klia’, in Tok Pisin, is then called sapukap and a hiding place kasapukɨn pora.

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individuals which enables them to do so; it is this same wambung which has to be primarily disclosed by its generosity.

There are several levels of looking at the visibility of things. Sometimes to see the hidden side, as Merleau-Ponty talked about seeing of all the sides of a lamp, it is sufficient to move a lamp a bit (1964: 14). If one does not see something, it does not mean that it is not there. Often one sees what he or she wants to see and not what is really there. Similarly it is with the Ambonwari men, who compete with each other for knowledge, power, and wealth. When I talked with Augustina’s son Jack about his healing practices, I was told that the people want to see kanggɨnɨng

‘something’ responsible for their pain, the visible ‘proof’ of their illness.

Plate 37: Drawing of Yambonman men’s house in which secret spirit-crocodiles, flutes, slit- drums, and carved posts were hidden from women and children © Jeffrey Donald 2011

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Many Ambonwari did not recover from the sickness when others just prayed over them without producing any visible signs of their sickness. That was also one of the reasons why the young men living in towns, who were in 1994 the last initiated

Ambonwari men, were called back to the village to help. This created three different ways of healing the sick in the village. Jack and Jeffrey were two new healers following customary procedures of solving the problems enriched by their skills and knowledge which they gained during their life in towns. Both of them were taught by the last traditional village healers before the Catholic charismatic movement whipped away the major customary practices in 1994. The villagers believe in the special powers of those who lived in towns where they acquired new skills. Jeffrey and Jack extract with their hand different objects from people’s bodies as a proof of pain, such as, for example, a piece of ginger covered by lime, a shell, stone, or piece of glass. This is a common practice in the Sepik, and as

Tuzin writes for the Ilahita Arapesh “a sign is needed, something to guide attention to what is ‘really’ happening” (1980: 263). In other words, people need to see something happening in the visible world. They are aware that there is also an invisible domain. A connection between visible and invisible domains is then established through signs (an image). People take the appearances of conventional signs as proof. “In the process, a kind of metaphysical truth is generated: gestures of belief are taken to be evidence of a reality that is created by those very gestures; the sign marks the intersection of appearance and reality”

(Tuzin 1980: 265). The healers then monitor the sick person and discuss his/her conflicts, which happened recently, and they prescribe a remedy that is first of all about settling the arguments in the family.

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Robin, the former charismatic leader, follows his dreams and uses the gift of the

Holy Spirit to help the people in a different, more spiritual way. He has the capacity to creatively invent new ways in the prayers and healing sessions. He does not extract any objects from the body, but with his hand pulls out the otherwise invisible negative energy. This happens when Robin is connected to God and he feels this in his shaking hand. The sick person should almost immediately feel relief.

Although at its beginning almost every villager joined the charismatic movement, after fifteen years the group has shrunk to only two dozen of the most faithful followers. At the same time those who became active in the village Catholic Church secured their own positions in its hierarchy. They belong to the third group of those who heal the sick. Felix, one of the four ministers of communion, told me that it is in his dreams where he meets the spirits of sick people and brings them back into their bodies. If he was too late, the spirit would not return back to a person and the sick person would die. His healing procedures are very similar to those of the local priest: listening to people’s sins, helping them in prayers, keeping away from any body contact. The dreams, however, and the capability of meeting the spirits of the living people (anggɨndarkwi) are additional strengths which not everyone has. For the Ambonwari ‘seeing is knowing’, which necessarily incorporates seeing in dreams. The dreams are a sort of visual evidence when one sees what is otherwise invisible. “What we dream about, we believe it will happen,” say the people.

The customary practices of two healers, Jack and Jeffrey, were challenged by some Catholic leaders saying that “the human body is special” and one should not extract all kinds of objects from it. They say that “God did not do that.” On the other hand, some villagers went quite far in their belief in God when they started to put

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offerings in the church with a plea to harm someone. They were thinking of taking revenge on someone without facing the person but paying God to do the ‘job’.

When this practice was discovered it was immediately criticized during the Sunday mass. However, the practice in the local church was reminiscent of old customary practices, when the spirits participated in all kinds of conflicts and were also offered food and money (shells). What is happening in Ambonwari in recent years, is a shift in secrecy and knowledge. On the one hand, things should be visible and accessible to everyone. On the other hand, there is always an invisible part which is accessible only to a chosen few. Whatever is seen, it is always questioned beyond its appearance and the invisible realm becomes the main focus of people’s exploration and speculation. The invisible world is the one where the actual power is hidden. One would say that the world of spirits of the dead is concealed and generally not visible. However, it is visible in dreams and visions. All the ‘white skin’ people belong to the world of the dead ones. Those who visit them are often perceived as their dead who have returned to the village. The world presented on the screen during our projections was therefore also perceived as the world of the spirits. The screenings only confirmed that the immense knowledge and wealth pertain to the invisible world (see Part III).

Throughout my fieldwork it became ever clearer that the invisible world is actually the real one and not the visible one. People constantly aim to get into that invisible domain and thus get access to reality, which means wealth, spiritual power, and the access to the secret knowledge. What people see are signs that confirm their belief that the reality is in the invisible domain. It is like digging into the earth and searching for what is hidden under. When a man says that he wants to see things with his own eyes, he does not mean this in some Western objectivistic and

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materialistic way, but more in a cosmological way which confirms that what he believes is true. We tend to ascribe metaphysical conceptualization of the world to religion, supernatural forces, and superstitions, and see them as being different from material reality which is for us the one we can see and touch. For the

Ambonwari, who do not distinguish between material and metaphysical reality, the things which they can hear, touch, and see are often just signs of a hidden, invisible reality. In other words the visible skin is full of signs but the reality and truth lie in wambung! And yet, to find out about the reality is to make it visible. In the following Part III, I approach that ‘reality’ through people’s reflections on the screenings of films, which I organized in Ambonwari throughout my fieldwork.

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PART III: Ambonwari-Eye

Plate 38: Jeffrey Donald with a book of inventions © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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A film becomes an independent surface, a ‘skin’, which shows the internal engagement of the filmmaker and the world to the spectators. The ‘skin’ is not merely the material entity of a human body, but also of a film (Barker 2009; Marks

2000, 2004). There is a reversible and reciprocal relationship between the self and other, the filmmaker and filmed, and the same happens between the film and viewer. In her book, The Tactile Eye (2009), Jennifer Barker links the ‘skin’ of a film with the ‘skin’ of a viewer. She writes:

Synapses and fingers are married – as are mind and body, and vision and

touch more generally – in the experience of cinema… to think, to speak, to

feel, to love, to perceive the world and to express one’s perception of that

world are not solely cognitive or emotional acts taken up by viewers and

films, but always already embodied ones that are enabled, inflected, and

shaped by an intimate, tactile engagement with and orientation toward

others (things, bodies, objects, subjects) in the world (Barker 2009: 22).

According to cinematic experience, she insists that “vision is married to touch”

(Barker ibid). Thus, the reciprocal relationship between film and viewer is a contact between two surfaces, between two ‘skins’, which are in continuous evolvement, interacting in impermanence and incompletion. To watch a film is not only about

‘touching with eyes’, but also about remembering the smell, taste, or movement. All the senses are implemented in vision when watching a film. All the senses are evoked. In this context, I want to talk about the cinematic experience as an entanglement of embodied, sensory, social and cultural memories. I use the word

‘memory’ as the capability of making sense of our past experiences and knowledge

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for the present. Nadia Seremetakis’ account on sensory memory in modernity tells us:

Memory cannot be confined to a purely mentalist or subjective sphere. It is

a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied acts

and semantically dense objects... Memory is the horizon of sensory

experiences, storing and restoring the experience of each sensory

dimension in another... Memory and the senses are co-mingled in so far as

they are equally involuntary experiences (1994: 9).

Laura Marks in her book, The Skin of the Film (2000), writes:

Intercultural films and videos often vigorously protect their sense memories.

In mainstream cinema, references to the nonaudiovisual senses tend to

appear as cinematic excess, an extra treat on top of the richness of

audiovisual representation. But for intercultural artists, memories of touch,

smell, taste, rhythm are not ‘extra’: they are the very foundation of acts of

cultural reclamation and redefinition (2000: 231).

In the Ambonwari context it is wambung (insideness), which incorporates understanding, thoughts, feelings, agency, and memory and which is engaged in the process of selecting and recollecting the actual sensory experiences. It is arɨm

(skin) of a person and also of a film, the screen, allowing and limiting the contact with the ‘outside world’.

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Laura Marks also talks about haptic and optical visuality. Whereas the latter is necessary for distance perception, the former emphasises kinaesthetic sense and

‘tactile seeing’. Visuality, in contrast to the physical capability of the human eye to see, is constructed vision (Rose 2007: 2). It is a way ‘how we see’ and actually

‘what we see’ which is blended with our cultural background and experiences.

Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari together with historian Alois Riegl,

Marks refers to the materiality of the image as an interactive surface. “For intercultural artists it is most valuable to think of the skin of the film not as a screen, but as a membrane that brings its audience into contact with the material forms of memory” (Marks 2000: 243). The ‘tactile looking’ makes us feel the limits of sensory knowledge. Haptic visuality, Marks writes, “implies a familiarity with the world that the viewer knows through more senses than vision alone. Changes of focus and distance, switches between haptic and optical visual styles, describe the movement between a tactile relationship and a visual one” (2000: 187). In other words, “we have optical touch as well as haptic vision” (Ingold 2011: 133). On the other hand, this ‘tactile seeing’, “in its effort to touch the image, may represent the difficulty of remembering the loved one, be it a person or a homeland” (Marks

2000: 193). In the context of watching movies with the Ambonwari, I call the visuality ‘horizon’, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) and Vivian Sobchack

(1992) in their exploration of the phenomenological mode of existence. This means that cinema is an extension of the viewer’s vision. “For the film as for us… the openness upon the world that is the act of viewing ‘implies that the world be and remain a horizon’ that extends beyond any immediate view seen by an existential presence that ‘is of it and is in it’” (Sobchack quoting Merleau-Ponty 1992: 131-

132). In other words, how we see a film, how we perceive it and interpret it is

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framed according to our ‘horizon’ encompassing lived experiences, sensuality, knowledge, and ultimately social and cultural background.

In this last part of the thesis I discuss people’s reflections on and interpretations of particular films and recordings. Throughout the year 2011, we watched and discussed recordings from the village made during my past visits and those made during the present fieldwork. We also watched foreign movies, feature and documentary, and productions made in and about Papua New Guinea (PNG). After discussions about the senses, external appearances and internal understanding, and about the use of the camera in the Ambonwari context in the preceding chapters, we are in a better position to understand people’s experiences and perceptions of the watched works.

In the previous chapter about communication, I discussed how seeing and hearing are the key sensual modalities involved in social interactions. This communicative aspect of sensory experiences became also apparent when watching different filmic productions in the village. In Chapter Five, Cinema in the Bush, I offer a brief history of audience studies while discussing in more detail a few of them that deal with the media in the PNG context. Several foreign feature movies are then presented in the context of people’s reflections, questions, and thoughts about them. I discuss reciprocal relationships and engagement of the Ambonwari people when watching the movies. Chapter Six is about self-recognition and self-reflection.

Being engaged in collaborative production enabled people to choose situations and people they wanted to record, show and see in a particular way. Seeing oneself and seeing others produced never ending requests for clarification of the reasons

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for the differences between the world of the Whites and the world of the Blacks, and between the spirits and living beings. It also stimulated debates about technology being a tool for creating new relationships.

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CHAPTER Five: Cinema in the Bush1

A Brief History of the Cinema in Papua New Guinea

The cinema in PNG during colonial times played only a marginal role and even when the films were screened they were heavily censored writes Jane Landman in her book about the cinema during the times of Australian colonialism (2006).2 I am not interested as much in censorship and political issues surrounding the projections of movies as I am in reactions to the cinema screenings in the past and present. One can find lots of writings and films made about PNG by the outsiders, but not many productions made by PNG people themselves. There were several attempts to establish a film production unit functioning in the country, but once the expatriates left PNG, the local people were hardly able to sustain the established project. Of course, there are good reasons for this. One of them is the lack of technical competence and technological facilities to sustain something like film production, especially in tropical weather conditions. The majority of places in PNG are without a reliable electricity supply and one needs to rely on power generators

1 Parts of this chapter were, under the same title ‘Cinema in the Bush’, published in Visual Anthropology 27(1-2): 25-44 (see Vávrová 2014).

2 Landman discusses also commercial movies made in PNG such as, Walk into Paradise (1956) and Frank Hurley’s movies Pearls and Savages (aka Headhunters of Unknown Papua, 1921) and Jungle Woman (1926).

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or solar panels. Another reason is that in the PNG context the cinema as such has a very different meaning and function than it has for a European spectator.

Regardless of the rising use of technology in the world, Papua New Guinea is, according to the most recent World Internet Usage Statistics from December 2011, minimally connected to cyberspace.3 With a population of 6.4 million people, PNG usage was only 2% in contrast to Australia with 89.8% of almost 22 million people.

The number of social network users in PNG, such as for Facebook or Twitter, however, reached over 73 thousand of 125 thousand of internet users. Papua New

Guineans use their mobile phones and internet access primarily for talking to and seeing their relatives as well as for establishing new relationships. It is important to remember that the media was invented primarily for communication between the people over long distances. Films too are a form of communication. In the

Ambonwari context, the watched movies had a message to be seen and shared with others.

In the late 1920s, Landman writes, there were only two commercial cinemas in the country. One was in Rabaul and the other one in Port Moresby (2006: 61). The

Papua New Guineans in rural areas were used to watching mainly religious and educational movies shown by the missionaries. In 1949 a new Bishop, the Divine

Word Missionary (SVD) Leo C. Arkfeld, was appointed in Wewak Diocese of the

East Sepik Province. He was also an airman and established the Wirui Air Services in Wewak (Fincutter 1999). He is well remembered by older Ambonwari people as the one who in the 1950s baptised the village for the first time. During his visits to

3 http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm (accessed on 10.5.2012).

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Sepik villages he also showed films about the life and death of Jesus. One of the villagers, Kevin, recalls:

Bishop Leo screened the pictures of Jesus twice on a big screen [canvas].

We saw Jesus being nailed to the cross, we saw how the light came down

and we heard him talking. It was a real thing. They killed the real man. Now,

when we see new films about Jesus [in a village house], it is not the same.

It is just pictures.4

Kevin’s comment is emblematic of how the Ambonwari attach extra significance and power to events and people from the past and from elsewhere, and how temporal and spatial distance blurs the difference between visible and invisible, and between reality and imagination. In Kevin’s case this ‘in between’ belongs to the short startling incident of Bishop Leo’s visit which included the screening. While at the time of the event the momentary excitement did not allow people either to think clearly or to resolve their doubts, the subsequent reflection incorporated the remembered fascination, anxieties and uncertainties into their final conclusion about what they had seen. We need to be aware that the questions of reality and imagination are culturally specific and what looks like reality for some may be imagination for others. There is a tight relation between sensory perception and the role of culture and as Merleau-Ponty wrote: “[T]here is an informing of perception by culture which enables us to say that culture is perceived” (1968: 212). In other

4 The conversation about watching the movies in the village with Kevin and his brother Samson was recorded on 25 November 2011 and translated by me in 2011-2012.

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words, culture not only makes us sense the world in a particular way but also works through perception.

Plate 39: A photographic collage presented for my confirmation seminar at James Cook University on 27 July 2010 © Vávrová 2010

During Christmas in 2007, I joined the Ambonwari when watching Jesus of

Nazareth (Zeffirelli 1977). In 2011, I saw several different DVD copies and compilations with the same theme but made by obscured productions from the

Indonesian market. Moreover, it is the villagers, the men of the place, who were in possession of the DVDs and not the Bishop, the ‘white man’ from far away. The present day screenings by the villagers created a very different situation from the one in 1950s when the secret objects were taken from the men’s house and tradition based on the initiation ritual was for the first time proclaimed as heathen and therefore unacceptable for the Catholic Church (Telban 1997b: 25-26, 2009:

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136). When asking further about Bishop Leo’s short stay in the village, the villagers attributed to him special powers saying, for example, that after he planted posts into the ground the house was built by itself. I was not surprised when during my travels in the East Sepik Province I learned that the majority of Papua New

Guineans mainly remembered Christian topics screened in their villages, and beside them also reels from the war time. It was these big cultural, social, and political issues that often preoccupied thoughts and feelings of people and made them question their own existence through the cultural and social lenses of a time.

In colonial times “the Papuan Administration had no interest in the differences between British-Australian or American production, instead judging fictionalisation itself as unhelpful and even dangerous” (Landman 2006: 70). In the 1950s more haus piksa (cinema in Tok Pisin) were built, one in Lae and another in Goroka.

World War II made PNG known to wider audiences and the movies about patrols walking through the jungle of PNG were distributed worldwide.5 Landman also mentions that there were mobile cinemas travelling around Gazelle Peninsula in

New Britain in the late 1950s. Apparently the Special Services Division of the

Department of Education managed to bring easier movable technology so that the educational movies could reach the villagers. The first mobile cinema, according to the expatriate newspaper South Pacific Post (1951), was a converted ambulance and the viewers were rarely fewer than four hundred people at a time (Landman

5 There were a few documentaries that we watched together with Ambonwari, one of them being the two-DVD Set Kokoda Frontline and Tobruk (2008). The older Ambonwari men were especially pleased to see Damien Parer's authentic footage from the war period in PNG.

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2006: 81). The cinema, however, was a ‘white man’s invention and was oriented mainly for the audience of ‘white men’. “The more flashing guns, the more whirling swords, the greater was audience-approval. Musical extravaganzas, and the more subtle films turned out by Hollywood and British studios, played to small audiences, composed mostly of Europeans”, reported Pacific Islands Monthly in 1956 when talking about the first cinema in Honiara, in that time still British Solomon Islands

(p. 131). Andrew Pike wrote in his New Guinea Film Notes in the 1980s: “While exploring some of the films made in PNG from the 1910s to the 1950s, I became aware that very few of these films had ever been shown there” (1981: 21). The production in and about PNG changed in the 1970s when Papua New Guinea was becoming independent. In Port Moresby, in those years, there was Skyline Drive-in cinema with the capacity of 450 cars. With the arrival of video players, national television, and due to street riots, the drive-in cinema was closed.6 The town of

Goroka in Eastern Highlands became the home of The National Film Institute in

1980s. In the new millennium a new Film School, Yumi Piksa, was created there and Papua New Guineans got an opportunity to learn how to make films.7 From

2012, those living in Port Moresby could visit the first PNG cinema multiplex in the newly built Vision City Mega Mall.8

6 See discussion about the drive-in cinema: http://masalai.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/port- moresby-to-finally-get-cinemas-again/ (viewed on 11.5.2012).

7 See Yumi Piksa website for contemporary work of PNG filmmakers in Goroka: http://www.visual-voices.org/Yumi_Piksa/Welcome.html, and an article by Thomas (2011).

8 In the online issue of Post-Courier newspaper one can read about the building of a new 3D cinema in Port Moresby (Friday 11th of March, 2011, by Brian Jemejeme):

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There are very few studies on the reception of films and audiences in PNG (Kulick and Willson 1994, Sykes 2007, Wardlow 1996, Wood 2006). On the other hand, there are many accounts about the urban television and cinema in other parts of the world, such as, for example, cinema-going in northern Nigeria (Larkin 2002), an analysis of Egyptian melodrama (Abu-Lughod 2002), the particularities of Indian cinema (Dwyer 2005), or Ghanaian Video Tales (Wendl 2004). Referring to these studies, Gordon Gray, in his book on cinema and visual anthropology, concluded that “viewing does not occur in a socio-cultural vacuum any more than production does. This is a significant difference as the specific historical, social, or religious contexts of India, Japan, Indonesia, or Nigeria are read into cinema, and it is through these contexts that the audience makes sense of the cinema” (2010: 130).

Papua New Guinea does not have a similar kind of study of cinema goers as India,

Nigeria or Ghana do. One documentary that examines the process of making films in PNG and their translation to other cultures is Taking Pictures (McLaren and

Stiven 1996). This documentary brings together several renowned Australian filmmakers such as, for example, Gary Kildea, Dennis O’Rourke, Bob Connolly and

Chris Owen, who were for a long time engaged in PNG filmmaking. In this documentary, they reflect upon their work thirty years ago. The film starts with the following words from Gary Kildea: “Certainly, we saw ourselves as sort of agents of antiracism” (McLaren and Stiven 1996). Yes, these filmmakers were ‘agents’ of

1960s when the ideas about equality of all cultures got wider distribution. It was an era, Kildea continues, about learning to “respect other people. The people you are

http://www.postcourier.com.pg/20110311/business04.htm (viewed on 6.6.2012), and there is an independent website on the cinema itself: http://paradisecinemapng.com/aboutus.php

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filming” (ibid). In those years, Cinema Vérité and Direct Cinema became concepts in filmmaking. Their film-art was not as much about the technicalities of making the film as it “implied whole new way of looking at people as well as making films”

(Kildea in McLaren and Stiven 1996). Before these productions there were old colonial accounts, which represented the country and people through Western paternalistic voice-overs and they often misrepresented people’s encounters with the new media. This new generation of filmmakers in the early 1970s has changed the filmic presentation of life in PNG. Beside Australian filmmakers, the Taking

Pictures documentary also presents us with an independent PNG filmmaker Martin

Maden. In 1985 he participated in a workshop at Ateliers Varan in Paris. “We were not indigenous filmmakers when we went to Paris” says Maden (McLaren and

Stiven 1996), but we were “trying to be filmmakers of any sort, I mean, we just wanted some training to understand the technology and to understand some of the language, the present language of film, you know... how people understand images on the screen and how people put those images together” (Maden in McLaren and

Stiven 1996). The documentary continues with the Baruya man, Kumain Kolain, who went to Paris as well. He wanted to see the footage made by Ian Dunlop, together with the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, about the male initiation ritual made in 1969-1972 (Towards Baruya Manhood). He wanted to learn about filmmaking too. Kolain had an opportunity to get equipment, return to the village, and record more details of the ritual (Sinmia 1985-1987). He could also demonstrate how the camera is used and talk to the people about making the films.

Many Baruya elders asked him if filming of the ritual took away the men’s spirits and brought them to the countries of ‘white men’. He said to his Baruya relatives:

“We must document everything on film and put it in a government library. Because

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unless we retain all our culture, when we die, the next generation will understand nothing” (Kolain in McLaren and Stiven 1996).

From Private Screenings to Public Cinema in Ambonwari

Like many other Sepik societies, the Ambonwari obtained their first generators, radios, and cassette players in the 1970s and 1980s. This was a period of string bands and disco parties (Telban 2009: 136). The first TV screen and VHS player were bought by an Aid Post Orderly, and the first screenings of movies – from

Rambo to First Contact – took place at the government health centre in Amboin in the early 1990s. This happened at the time when Rambo-like characters were imitated in rascal attacks throughout the East Sepik Province and other places in

PNG.9 Amboin Station, at the intersection of the Arafundi and Karawari rivers, became a meeting point for those interested in watching the movies. In the audience, in addition to the health centre’s patients, were the station’s workers, their relatives, and visitors from the closest villages of Yimas and Kundiman. The

Ambonwari and others from more remote villages had to paddle and walk there over longer distances. Later on, another Ambonwari Aid Post Orderly bought a new video player and TV screen and brought them to the village. Watching movies occurred sporadically in his or others’ private houses and included the collection of an entrance fee. The first generators, TV screens, and video players soon broke down and it took months and years before they were repaired or replaced. With the advance of technology, VHS cassettes were exchanged for VCD and then DVD discs. It was in 2007 when the first DVD player arrived at the village. The

9 A couple of PNG studies addressed Rambo movies in particular, with regard to gender and power relationships in the PNG context (Kulick and Willson 1994, Wood 2006).

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screenings continued to take place in private houses although only occasionally.

The repertoire, besides ‘customary’ Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Bruce and

Brandon Lee and Jean-Claude Van Damme, expanded to include Jesus of

Nazareth and Lord of the Rings. Who were the audiences during these screenings in private houses? Because of the small size TV screen and the fact that the houses were always full of children, the adults often stayed outside, chatting and chewing betel nuts. Some people could not enter a house because of their specific kin relationship or their unresolved disputes with the owner of the house. Women, especially older ones and those with many children, were rarely able to pay the entrance fee. The price was 1 PNG Kina (0.47 Australian Dollar) for an adult and

20 or 50 toea for a child. Besides, married women were not expected to leave their house at night. Quarrels about what would be watched were canvassed by old grudges and constant jealousy, and now and then resulted in destruction of the screening equipment (throwing a new DVD player into the creek, for instance). The movies were routinely cut short, as young people loudly demanded to exchange them for music video-clips. Many of these things changed once I started, with the regular public screenings being opened to everyone.

Augustina and her adult daughters, with their own children, lived in a half broken house. We agreed that it was well suited for the screenings. The house did not have any fixed walls. It was easy to remove the temporary walls, made of sago- palm leaves. My projection set was positioned inside the house in front of the large open space, ideal for the audience. With the help of young boys from our area, a queen size bed sheet was nailed to two sticks, which were stuck into the ground.

My intention was to project on a big screen and to make the image visible for all.

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The enlarged size of the screen changed people’s perception of the seen image: the depth of field, shapes and movements became more noticeable and defined.

Bodies and things previously reduced in size were suddenly enlarged. What was before hidden in a small box (TV screen) and looked like a private affair opened up, became public and free of charge.

Plate 40: Screening the footage from 2007-2008 in Crocodile-1 Clan area © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Within twelve months, we had twenty-four screenings. Each session lasted around six to seven hours, beginning at dusk. Approximately three hundred people including children – almost half of the village population – were present at any one time. Each projection began with a slide show and music while waiting for people to gather. I combined stills from my previous visits to the village with those recently photographed. Sometimes I showed the photographs of my family, friends, and

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other places around the world. During the first screenings I showed edited pieces of my recordings from 2005, 2007 and 2008. These were later substituted with people’s work, which included both stills and short video-clips. The program continued with one or two feature films, sometimes with a documentary film, and ended with a few PNG music video-clips.

Plate 41: Screening The Book of Eli © Daniela Vávrová 2011

The screening program was made up just before each projection. It was a combination of my preferences and people’s requests. It sometimes happened that the whole event circled around a particular geographic area, and was consequently referred to as Papua New Guinean, Asian, African, European or American night.

The free of charge collective watching of stori piksa (movies, in Tok Pisin) slowly became an important social event during the course of my fieldwork.

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I had a very small collection of foreign feature and documentary films prior to my departure. I thought of showing a variety of films, especially those that are audio- visually interesting, more about bodily action than language. The priority was given to the footage made in the village and with the Ambonwari themselves. The people, however, were eager to watch anything and demanded to see foreign films regardless of any language problem. They said that they wanted to see the places where ‘white people’ live. I bought some additional films when in Brisbane repairing my camera. I was also given many more films, throughout my fieldwork, by the local priest Piotrek Waśko. Other villagers were bringing their DVDs to screen, but because most of them were black copies from Indonesia, they did not work properly. Often the films stopped shortly after they began. Thus, the selection of movies was not fully made up before I went to the field. It developed over time and according to people‘s likeness and their demands.

The villagers requested projections almost every starry night. The young people gathered to chat, smoke and chew betel nuts, seduce each other, and watch.

Some did not pay much attention to the movies, but enjoyed the size of the image, projected light, and the audience. “We will watch today, won’t we?” became a greeting. The Ambonwari were proud of being the only place in Amboin Parish and beyond that had ‘film nights’. Those from other villages often came to Ambonwari to see what was going on as they had heard about our projections. They stayed overnight in hope that it would not rain and we would watch movies. They asked me to come and make projections in their villages too. Towards the end of my

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fieldwork, I actually became tempted to start with wokabout stori piksa (travelling cinema, in Tok Pisin). This, however, I have not realised yet.

Watching Avatar

My ‘brother’ Daniel asked me the day after watching Avatar, “Who are these

[beings] with tails? Where are they from?”10 I answered that these kinds of places and people exist in our imagination where we see and do things, which would otherwise never happen. I also said that some films are fully invented. The places are made in a studio and the people only act. Daniel nodded, thought for a while, and smiled as he paddled away to his garden. I did not know what his smile meant, but I knew that for the Ambonwari it was in dreams when and where they met the spirits of the dead and the bush spirits. Similar inquiries about the whereabouts of the ‘people with tails’ were made by other villagers as well. The majority of the viewers, however, did not question how the movie was made but they asked about the veracity of what they had seen on the screen. They questioned the nature of a film as such. They said that something that was captured by the camera-eye should exist somewhere.

10 The movie Avatar (2009) was directed by James Cameron, known as the director of Titanic (1997) and The Terminator (1984). Avatar tells a science fiction story of Na’vi people and their land. “The lush primal world of Pandora and the exotic culture of the Na’vi revealed in the film include many of the basic elements of what used to be called “primitive” societies — animism, a coming-of-age ceremony and test of manhood, a religion based on a supreme (maternal) tree spirit. It is truly a 21st-century elegy to a lost world — as well as Cameron’s warning to our own” (Lutkehaus 2009).

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Plate 42: The story-board Avatar © Bapra Simi 2011

Bapra, one of Augustina’s daughters living with us in the house, asked me to give her paper and pencils to draw the story of Avatar, simply saying that she liked it.

While not getting into the question of existence or nonexistence of tail-people, she rather carefully observed the details of the unknown bush, luminous vines, giant flowers, flying spirits, and the animals like horses and big birds. She said that the

Ambonwari were amazed to see how, by connecting their braid, a Na’vi person’s wambung (thoughts and feelings in Karawari) could join the wambung of a

Direhorse. They liked the flying creature called Ikran, and plants such as the giant

Tree of Souls. During its first screening the movie was received with strong emotions, a mixture of anxiety and disgust. In the middle of the screening I was asked to stop it and play something else. I did that. People saw the characters and events as ones that really existed and did not want to accept my explanation about

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our culturally specific understanding of fiction and fantasy. People said that a being with a tail is simply not good. It cannot be a human being or it is a human being with an animal-like deformation. The characters in Avatar are rather like bush spirits, demons and devils. Some Ambonwari asked: “Where are the children of the

Na’vi?” One of the attentive viewers, Francis, explained that he saw a mother with baby who also had a tail. He concluded that children were already born with the tail. He was amazed to see the Na’vi people walking on the tree branches as if they would walk on the ground, jumping from one branch to another without any problems, sometimes just holding the vines. The viewers also laughed at many scenes and appearances and were giggling when asking how did these ‘blue skin creatures’ make holes in trousers so that their tails could stick out. They described the Na’vi as beings with ears like dogs, fingers like mushrooms, and toes resembling gecko’s feet. Whenever they approached me individually, they asked over and over again: “Where do these creatures live? Are they humans or spirits?”

When the film was finally screened to its end a month later, the Ambonwari could not easily accept that the ‘people with tails’ would have won the battle. The humans are stronger than animals and they are supposed to win in a battle with other beings. With the spirits, however, they may lose and that is why the Ambonwari got scared when watching the movie for the first time. I screened Avatar for the third time during the last 24th public night screening. This time, people supported the

‘people with tails’. By now they had understood that the army wanted to destroy

Na’vi people’s bush, steal their land, and chase them away or kill them.

The Ambonwari searched for ‘sameness’. Sameness is materially manifested in the images and recordings. The images reveal evidence of similitude, confirmation of

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relationships and relatedness across time and space. For the Yolngu, Deger writes:

“The active seeking and recognition of sameness over difference acts to reconfirm the place of these individuals within a wider world of meaning and ongoing connections” (2006: 201). In a similar way the Ambonwari deal with the ‘outside world’ and the ‘white people’ they meet. Many think that the world of ‘white people’ is the world of the dead ones, of the spirits of the dead, which could mean that the camera and its recordings are the mediators between two worlds: the world of the living and the world of the dead. This is not unusual. Many ethnographers were faced with Papua New Guineans equating the ‘white people’ with the spirits of the dead (Hirsch 2008; Lattas 1992, 2010; Leavitt 2000; Telban and Vávrová 2010;

Tuzin 1997). Lattas, for example, recently wrote that for many New Britain villagers, especially those involved in cargo cults, new technological devices became

“vehicles of creativity and imagination”, which enabled the followers to “re-explore the world of the dead through local techno-visual and techno-audio practices”

(2010: 104). The Ambonwari often felt frustrated about not being able to put their hands on the wealth of the ‘white people’ presented in the movies. This inability resulted in their resentment of their own spirits of the dead who live with the

‘whites’ and are blamed for not sharing their wealth. This sharing includes revelation of 'secret practices' and disclosure of the powers of 'secret machines' such as camera, computer or projector (cf. Lattas 2010: Chapter 3). It is also assumed that the images of dead people ought to be in possession of ‘white people’ who are most probably capable of meeting them in person and not just on the film.11

11 It happened that in Kungriambun, a Karawari-speaking village, I recorded a man telling his child: “She [Daniela] is an Ambonwari woman. She is from Ambonwari. Don’t be scared! She died and has returned back.”

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The reception of foreign feature movies in PNG has not been discussed yet in this context of cosmology and relations with the spirits. Those who know about the

Second Life virtual existence can imagine how the supreme one can appear in cyberspace. For the Ambonwari, it was not a virtual existence, but the actual life after death that might be wealthier and healthier. The camera, like any other new technological device, might be a messenger between those two worlds. One of the villagers in his fifties, Kerobin, who married a woman near Maprik and moved to her place, remembered an event when 39 Japanese tourists arrived near his wife’s place to see the graves of their deceased family members – soldiers – who were killed in PNG during WW II. He said that large speakers were connected to the graves, the voices in the Japanese language were suddenly heard, and the relatives were able to listen to their dead ones. When repeatedly asked if he really thought that people with tails existed somewhere, Kerobin answered: “I don’t know.

It could be the truth and it could be a lie. What I do know, however, is that

Europeans also had similar doubts when they thought that people in PNG had tails.”12 This was a nice twist, a move into early colonial thought when animal-like characteristics were hastily applied to the unknown “Other.”

In his recent book on avatars, Coleman wrote: “The success of Avatar as a film is its ability to tap into a technological futurism and an epic, ancient narrative of heroes who channel the highest spirits. As a fiction, Avatar promises that we can

12 The casual discussions with Kerobin in Tok Pisin were written into a notebook on 6 April 2011 and translated by me in 2012.

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be our best selves in avatar form“ (Coleman 2011: 160).13 In this sense, the fictionalised space takes a new shape according to our past, knowledge, and experiences entangled in our memory and imagination. We, in whichever culture, create from it a ‘higher existence’ in which we can unconditionally trust. However, while the Ambonwari do not daydream about and do not idealize a life, which would be closely entangled with ‘nature’, the Western man continues to dwell on a romantic perspective of ‘nature’ with which, in the abundance of impersonal and cold machinery, he feels he had lost that primal connection. From this perspective one could say that both Papua New Guineans and Europeans live their own idiosyncratic dreams and imaginations about the perfect world.

The Last Bible and the Magic of Red Balloon

There were several foreign feature movies, which the Ambonwari liked and repeatedly mentioned when we walked, paddled, ate, or sat and talked at nights.

The Book of Eli (2010) was one of them and fitted well into the village context. We watched it three times, once even with the Parish priest, SVD missionary Piotrek

Waśko from Poland, who came to the village following his regular bimonthly visits.

The story is about Eli (Denzel Washington), a ‘black man’, who tries to rescue the last Bible on Earth. People did not notice that Eli was most probably blind. Only when I explained that the Bible was written in special signs, they learned that there

13 Coleman explains that “The history of ‘avatar’ and the evolving meaning of that term span millennia. It originates in the ancient Sanskrit language of Hinduism, where it meant the god descending into a terrestrial form... Over time, in the English language, ‘avatar’ came to stand for a mode of allegory – figural representation. And now most recently, in the wake of the creation of computer-generated interactive figures, the avatar is the digital embodiment that represents us in a networked forum” (2011: 163).

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exists a special language for those who cannot see. It was hard to explain that the film takes place in the imaginary future. “All this happened in the past, didn’t it?” the

Ambonwari asked. I actually understood why they thought so. First, how could someone watch something that has not happened yet and was not part of a dream? Second, the muted sepia-like colours of the post-apocalyptic image and the barren environment signified the past for the Ambonwari. Several people were explicitly pleased to see the movie, especially those who were during last fifteen years involved in the Catholic Charismatic movement (see Telban 2009). The former leader of the movement, Robin, said: “I was worried about the man when watching the movie. I sat, I watched, some [Ambonwari] wanted to change it, but I wanted to see how one man could defeat many because God was with him. You can win, even if you are confronted with the power of the earth [spirits], poison, or sanguma sorcery, because you walk around with this man [God] inside you.” Robin went on to say that he also received the present from God, so that his prayers have power (he can, for example, cure the sick). But just like the Bible stolen from Eli had no power for the bad ‘white man’ Carnegie (Gary Oldman), Robin too cannot give his present to anyone else as it would be powerless. Robin said: “Just like this black American man carried the Bible, I carry the gifts of the Holy Spirit.” I told him that Eli actually kept the Bible in his head. He was able to dictate the whole Bible from his memory, to be written down before he died. Robin, thinking of Eli, concluded: “I am the Bible. I am the Bible just like Jesus who said ‘I am the true vine and I am the light of this Earth’.”14

14 Dialogue with Robin was recorded in Tok Pisin on 13 June 2011 and translated by me in 2011-2012.

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Plate 43: Drawing of The Book of Eli © Pierson Greg 2011

It was interesting to observe how the Ambonwari tried to identify themselves and their life-world with the movie characters or the issues that were played out on the screen. The Western films are full of signifiers, visual signs or codes, and it is required to have a certain level of culturally specific knowledge to decode them and understand what is basically going on. Having no experiences of, for example, eating particular food, using an elevator, or driving a car, the film scenes are understood purely visually and acoustically without embodied memory. On the other hand, acting for the Ambonwari is not an unknown matter. They love to perform in front of the camera conveying a message to possible viewers (like

Drama video-clip mentioned earlier). People act, however, with their own social and cultural signs which need to be decoded by a Western spectator. Photographs and films are the mediums of, and for, communication and remembrance. Film is always subjectively interpreted regardless of its common background. The past

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experiences guided people’s perception, which in the context of watched foreign movies lacked the appropriate structure and the contents. David MacDougall writes:

Recognition of objects and persons involves a constant testing of

hypotheses about what we see, drawn from our learned and automatic

habits of perception and from our prior experience. Our sense of space in

the cinema relies upon recognition, but also upon piecing together the shots

into a larger imaginative structure. In practicing in this construction, we are

drawn further into the film in mind and body (2006: 24-25).

I would say that the basic recognition of places, people and things was the primary issue for the Ambonwari dealing with the photographs and movies. This basic recognizing process dominated incorporation of the shots into a larger imaginative structure. Often I thought of the following sentence: “I can only understand what I can visualize,” said a mnemonist whose behaviour was in 1930s studied by a

Russian psychologist Luria (1975: 100).15 For the mnemonist, cognitive functions could hardly proceed without visualisation; the images began to guide his thinking rather than thought being the dominant and logical element. It was similar with the

Ambonwari’s understanding of what they saw on the screen. Being overwhelmed by the images and sounds of unknown places and people, they could not always

15 In Luria’s ‘little book about a vast memory’ (1975), the main protagonist Mr. S appropriates all the words, verses, and numbers to inner images. Through these images he remembers things indefinitely. He cannot easily forget. The words, which do not sound as they ‘look like’ are hard to understand and remember.

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follow the plot, but focused on both surprising and familiar particularities and details.

Plate 44: Drawing of The Red Balloon © Pierson Greg 2011

It was only when I screened a short movie The Red Balloon (1956) of a French director Albert Lamorisse, that I got the feeling of satisfying everyone. The film was definitely a local success.16 The story of a friendship between the boy and the red balloon became the favourite movie of all the foreign featured ones I had screened.

Why did the Ambonwari like it so much? I would say that there are two

16 “The only short film ever to win an Oscar for best original screenplay, Albert Lamorisse's little wonder tells the story of young Pascal (Lamorisse's own son Pascal), a nine-year-old Parisian boy living an ordinary life in a sketchy but absolutely gorgeous and cinematic Parisian neighborhood until the day that a large red balloon mysteriously floats into his life... and stays” (Willmott 2008).

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characteristics that made the movie so acceptable. The first is that there is not much dialogue but a lot of bodily action that can be understood in a different cultural setting. The second characteristic circles around people’s strong desire to possess things that they see others have (i.e. ‘hands follow eyes’). The Ambonwari often accuse each other of being greedy and do not allow individuals to stand out.

When something new arrives at the village everyone wants to have it, saying: amangok ‘me too’. To exclude someone from something is taken as an offence.

One can identify these issues well when observing Ambonwari children in particular. It is this characteristic which they recognized in the film, in the crowd of boys who wanted to get hold of the boy’s red balloon. It is a kind of bodily response to known feelings that are specific not just for the French or the Ambonwari. Some days after the second screening of the movie, all the children were carrying catapults around the village and making small balls from clay. While, on the one hand, the children were just mimicking the boys from the movie wanting to show that they have slings as well, on the other hand there was a kind of anticipation that the balloons with wambung, that is, the balloons that could feel and think, would suddenly appear in the village. Augustina concluded: “I think that this is a story of the ancestors of all balloon families.” Others questioned me: “How did the boy control the balloon? What kind of power is that? How come that the balloon recognizes the little boy? You can train a dog to recognize your smell, but how can you train a balloon?” While adults readily admitted that they would like to have such a balloon, children reacted more bodily and actively. David MacDougall wrote from his experience with children in the Doon School in India: “Children apply ideas to the physical and social world quite indiscriminately in order to see what will happen, whereas adults have generally disciplined themselves to discuss only

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what is known and sanctioned” (2006: 88). During the 20th public projection in

Ambonwari, which included foreign feature movies like Léon (1994) and Slumdog

Millionaire (2008), I was openly told by one dissatisfied villager that: “We have enough of ‘white people’s movies, we want to see more of us and our country, and more of your relatives and your country.”

The responses to the foreign feature films were not surprisingly either silence filled with uncertainty and resentment or cargo-like reactions (see Lattas 2010). The movies showed that the ‘white people’ have many goods, live in big cities, and have cars as the Ambonwari anticipated, dreamt about, heard from other villagers, or saw in magazines and books. Our projections brought a vast amount of sounds and images, and particularities which were sometimes not at all recognized. What was somehow missing was a transition from abstract knowing to actual doing, from what had been seen to what could be touched, held, and used. As this transition – in the case of foreign movies – was slow or did not happen at all, the Ambonwari tried to find paths, which would have enabled this transition. The Ambonwari were not passive viewers. With silence or by questioning the existence of beings with tails in Avatar, by identifying with the man who is the Bible in The Book of Eli, or by making catapults and mimicking the boys in The Red Balloon, the Ambonwari entered an empty space between known and unknown, and between visible and invisible. In this limbo, new paths can be created and new relationships established.

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CHAPTER Six: Seeing Oneself

The World of Black and White

The act of seeing is complex, composite, embodied and existential. There is a kind of hierarchy in our intentions and interests when looking at the world. There are differences in our attention to the particularities of the visible, and there is a certain individual latency in our visual perception. This latency, writes Vivian Sobchack in her book The Address of the Eye, is in seeing “something visible that is not yet a

‘thing’, not yet a figure, that is merely an indeterminate ground from which my intention carves a figure in an active and ongoing attention and determination”

(1992: 90). Beside themselves, the Ambonwari wanted to see on the screen the

‘white people’ they know, their families and friends, to establish relationships through seeing. Sobchack following Merleau-Ponty explains, that there is “a reciprocity, a reversibility, a dialectic at work in vision between the seer and the seen” (1992: 118). This phenomenological interrelationship occurs in particular between a film and attentive spectators as well as between a filmmaker and the filmed people. One could say that watching the movies with the Ambonwari played a part in constructing – and was at the same time constructed by – the contemporary cultural and social specificities of the village. Many villagers commented: “In the past we only heard the stories. Now we know it, we have seen it in the film.” This knowing or luk save (knowing by seeing, in Tok Pisin), however, was faced with a certain unfamiliarity, uncertainty, and incompatibility.

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The Ambonwari want to build a bridge between their world and the world of

‘whites’, which will enable them to get the know-how and the goods that this know- how is capable of creating. ‘White people’ are not simply spirits of the dead. They are spirits of people's dead relatives. Kerobin told a story of how Benedict Ambun’s mother Kwasɨmbi once recognized her own mother in one of the female tourists visiting Ambonwari from Karawari Lodge. Kerobin said:

She [the tourist] was a photocopy of her [Kwasɨmbi’s] deceased mother.

She was her photocopy. So, Benedict’s mother came forward, held her,

hugged her, bit her cheeks, and touched her chin with a hand. Everybody

was sure that the white woman was in fact her [Kwasɨmbi’s] deceased

mother. She [the tourist] did not speak English. She was from Italy or from

some other place in Europe. She gave Benedict’s mother some gifts and

told her to come to Karawari Lodge, where she would give her more.

Kwasɨmbi never went to the Lodge but stayed in the village. Kerobin then reflected upon the screening of the old footage from the village saying: “When the people saw on the film all those who had already died, some thought: ‘The two whites surely live with them. How else would they be in possession of their images?’”17

Other villagers said that, just as Darja Hoenigman went to neighbouring Kanjimei

17 The casual discussions with Kerobin in Tok Pisin were written into a notebook on 20 March 2011 and translated by me in 2012. The two ‘white people’ mentioned by Kerobin are Borut Telban and myself.

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village because she is the spirit of a deceased Kanjimei woman, so I returned to

Ambonwari as the spirit of a deceased Ambonwari woman.18 We, being spirits of their dead, are capable of communicating with their other dead relatives in the places of the ‘white people’, either Europe, Australia, or the USA.

As anthropologists we constantly have a double-role: one is expected to be the local who belongs to a particular clan and lineage, eats with the people, speaks their language, and knows their culture; at the same time one takes another role, that of a ‘white person’ and everything that pertains to it. "It is an insistence by

Melanesians that Europeans live up to their obligations to share wealth as intimates should," wrote Leavitt from his experience with the Bumbita Arapesh of the East Sepik Province in PNG (2000: 306). He had similar experiences, though he was mainly seen as a Westerner and not as a spirit. Sharing and exchange are well known issues for the scholars working in Melanesia. For the Ambonwari, all the goods and actions seen in foreign movies on the screen were somehow disclosing the plenitude of goods and vast knowledge that ‘white people’ and the spirits possess. The villagers constantly questioned why these goods and know- how are hidden from them instead of being shared. In his book The Meaning of

Whitemen, Ira Bashkow wrote: “The light color of whitemen’s skin is identified with the attractive brightness and conspicuousness of whitemen’s extravagant wealth”

(2006: 209). Many things that Bashkow describes and analyses are common for other areas of PNG too. He continues:

18 When I arrived to the village for the first time in 2005, I was adopted into Crocodile-1 Clan and given the name Yapisay Mandukmay.

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Whitemen seem not to be subject to the normal moral economy of

interpersonal relations, in which the sight of wealth arouses desire in others,

setting in motion processes that diminish that wealth either by requiring that

persons who see it receive a portion of it in compensation, or else by

arousing negative feelings of frustrated desire and jealousy that lead people

to reciprocate destructively with crime or sorcery (Bashkow ibid).

The Orokaiva people, Bashkow explains, “conceive of seeing as a type of social transaction that requires reciprocation... In the act of seeing, the seer creates a relationship with the object seen that has the potential to extend beyond the moment of beholding” (2006: 122). This implies that seeing is fundamentally relational. I was aware of this when approaching the screenings in the village. I was aware that the Ambonwari, like other PNG societies, construct their life-world on exchange relationships. This can be detected in their myths of origin. As Telban, for example, writes: “Kapi, the primordial ancestor of Crocodile-1 Clan, moved from place to place, made relationships with people whom he met on his way, exchanged with them goods, objects, secrets, ‘sisters’, and ‘daughters’” (1998:

152). Moreover, in this remote past men’s houses, spirit-crocodiles, rituals, children, names and other important items of their cosmology were also exchanged for partnership or for the ownership of land (Telban 2008: 223-224). In short, gift- giving and the exchange of gifts on a personal as well as on a collective level have always been the fundamental practices of the creation and recreation of relationships between people and groups. In everyday life the Ambonwari constantly give, exchange, borrow and lend many things: betel nuts, betel piper, lime, tobacco, gum boots, clothes, canoes, paddles, axes, bush knives, strings with

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hooks, food, etc. This is especially so if somebody has many things of the same kind or if the things are new. This asking for things and expecting to get them begins at the family level, moves to classificatory kin relations, and then expands to any old or newly created relationship beyond village borders. If people are short of something, the others should help them. The help will not be without avail. There is always something that will be given in return. As the Ambonwari not only create but also perceive the world through their relationships, exchanges and gift-giving practices, the perception of the screened movies and the ‘white people’s wealth rests on the same foundation. For the Orokaiva, and I would say for the Ambonwari too, the “eye is the organ of egalitarian values” (Bashkow 2006: 123). The

Ambonwari are puzzled when looking at the ‘white people’ and their wealth. The latter know too much and posses too many things. “Why should whitemen’s ancestors have left them such a rich legacy, but [our] own ancestors left [us] so little?” ask the Orokaiva (Bashkow 2006: 115). Over the years I experienced this kind of questioning in Ambonwari all over again. Watching foreign movies even more accentuated a radical conceptual distinction and simultaneous interrelationship between ‘black’ and ‘white’ beings, which underlies the

Ambonwari’s general perception of the world.

"The real story of cargo in Melanesia is not so much that getting access requires the proper secret knowledge; rather, it is that failure to gain access is an inevitable component of the scenario, and cargo ideology insists on interpreting that failure as an icon for a rift in relations with close relatives who have died" (Leavitt 2000: 312).

Leavitt’s comment reminds me of one Ambonwari man who said that on banknotes we cannot see where they were made. While on all other products there is a written

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note saying ‘made in PNG’ or ‘made in China’, on the banknotes there is none. He asked: “Why it is not written on money where it was made? Who makes money?

Do we make money in Papua New Guinea?” Another man asked: “Why is Sir

Michael Somare on a 50 Kina banknote when he is still alive?” There are suspicions that hiding the place where the money is made is deliberate with a purpose not to reveal the true place of the dead spirits who make decisions about the banknotes’ layout, values, and distribution. The spirits of the dead keep this as a secret and do not want to share it with the living. Andrew Lattas in his book

Dreams, Madness, and Fairy Tales in New Britain, explains that "[t]elephones, wirelesses, binoculars, cameras, photos, televisions, and videos were taken up, for they promised not just more knowledge, but also a different, more powerful knowledge via more powerful perceptual experiences" (2010: 103-104).

Technology, especially in cargo cults, became a realm for "introducing the alterity of a distant outsideness in ways that would redraw seemingly fixed social boundaries" (Lattas 2010: 105). Among New Britain villagers, like in Ambonwari, some customary forms were assimilated to modern technology (see Chapter Four).

The contact that people of PNG try to make is in Lattas' view based on "a conflict between different ways of producing the effect of making the world present through a sense of what is absent" (2010: 107). I think that in New Britain, among the

Karawari, or in cyberspace, we all are faced with similar issues. New technology not only brings things closer, but presents them in a specific way where seeing with the eyes is even more related to touching than it was the case without the use of technology. Coleman, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with the avatars, wrote: "Like other emerging media technologies of the early twenty-first century that possess the qualities of real-time interactions, visualization and a sense of

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inhabiting space together, the virtual world offered everyday media users an experience that was neither entirely virtual nor real but vividly actual" (2011: 12-13).

The issue is even more complex. The initiation rituals were in the past a form and practice of transformation into a new life. New technologies are nowadays perceived as the means which could create a new world. Lattas argues that

“Melanesians can rediscover themselves through a modern perspective that gives a future and creative relevance to customary concerns with the dead and the invisible” (2010: 113).

It is the tension between those things that belong to the Ambonwari’s immediate presence and those that belong to the horizon. While the immediate presence is encapsulated in the Ambonwari’s concept of the ‘black people’, the horizon is framed in their concept of the ‘whites’ and of the ‘outside world’. The latter group includes all beings with a lighter skin, be they Europeans, Asians, Papuans, or the spirits of the dead. “We are the black people”, one of the viewers said, “we do not know anything. Our eyes are closed. We live in darkness. The eyes of white people are opened. Their eyes see everything.” This kind of thoughts continually emerged when people were faced with unfamiliar issues during our screenings. “Films and filmmaking”, however, wrote MacDougall, “are valuable not so much for conducting theoretical arguments as for transporting the viewer into unfamiliar circumstances and creating more radical perspectives” (2006: 141). The visual alterity, phenomenologically, constitutes the film experience.19 The otherness becomes a

19 When watching a movie, a viewer tries to identify oneself with the characters or situations. Alterity is distancing oneself from the identified self. To be self-aware is to exist at a distance from oneself. It is also being the other of two, yin and yang, for example.

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quality, a base for relations, and it replaces inequality (cf. Stasch 2009). For the

Ambonwari then, while immediate presence, regardless of the abandonment of the majority of collective customary practices, continues to be enclosed in tradition, an expanded horizon became a fertile field for imagination.

Watching PNG Productions

The majority of the villagers, especially the young ones, see projections as entertainment and would repeatedly watch music video-clips. CHM Supersound

PNG production provides the viewer not only with music and songs, but also with dancing to which the Ambonwari pay special attention. New fashionable body movements seem to provide young people with the means of expressions that bring them beyond the social constraints of the village. Singing and dancing helps them to overcome embarrassment and shame when socializing. It also gives them the feeling of belonging to their common Sepik style, as they like to say, and the modern nation at large. In Tonga, “audiences experience the movies in the larger context of various faiva (dance, music, poetry), oratory, and storytelling” (Hahn

2002: 260). It could be said the same for the Ambonwari. The nightly screenings were not just about watching films and photographs, but rather an entertaining social event. When showing PNG productions and films about PNG generally, the villagers promptly recognized common cultural specificities, which made them muse, laugh, or worry.20

20 See three music video-clips made by the young Ambonwari villagers in the sago forest. I screened them at least once during each of our public village projections: Jeffrey & Abel 01, Jeffrey & Abel 02, Jeffrey & Abel 03.

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The ethnographic film Ngat is Dead (2009) was well received as the film is about the involvement of the ethnographer in local mortuary practices among the Baluan people in Manus Province of PNG.21 I chose this film because of its topic, the Tok

Pisin language, and knowing in person the anthropologist and the other two filmmakers. The Ambonwari were pleased to see how other anthropologists work in their villages and record with a camera as I do. Moreover, I knew the film crew which made it even more interesting for the villagers. The visual codes were easily recognizable and Tok Pisin expressions were familiar to the Ambonwari. My ‘sons’ from Crocodile-1 Clan told me: “Now we know how to behave when your brother

[Daniel Akwi], our father, will die. We will hold and hug you and will cry with you.”

After seeing how the anthropologist Ton Otto counted money to be distributed between different groups as a part of a mortuary ceremony, the former Ambonwari councillor Samuel commented: “We should not demand so many things from them

[the ‘white people’]. It is not good. They are exhausted from our demands. It is also the reason why so many of them never return.” The same man was fascinated with my short portrait of Mary Wellington who runs a PNG radio program in Cairns. He was proud of this Manus woman doing well in Australia and immediately wanted me to record a message for her. He would also like to expand his social relationships – in Tok Pisin known as wantok system – and possibly get some advantage from this connection. Radio, being a significant and primary source of information for the villagers, gained on importance even more. I knew the radio

21 Ngat is Dead (2009) was made by Christian Suhr, Steffen Dalsgaard, and Ton Otto. Distribution by Documentary Educational Resources: http://www.der.org/films/ngat-is- dead.html

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presenter and thus the Ambonwari could establish a relationship with Cairns, in

Australia, as well.

The most popular of all PNG titles I presented, Tinpis Run (1991), the PNG-

Belgium-French-UK coproduction, satisfied young and old, male and female, sceptics and wonderers. Beside The Red Balloon, it was the most appreciated film.

The acted comedy is full of clichés, activities and ways of talking that are characteristic for the country at large: brawls and fights, corrupted politicians who constantly repeat how concerned they are about the people, trickery and theft, gambling, generational differences, and the preoccupation with business. Being a kind of road movie, one can see vast landscapes from mountains to sea, towns and villages, and bus stops and markets. The movie made people laugh by showing the stubbornness of a ‘big man’, implicit sexual relations, or traditional fights between two Highlands’ tribes.22 After watching the film, which by its vistas captured the imagination of many, Augustina said: “When I see all these images, I am asking myself: ‘Why didn’t the sea come all the way to here, but stopped in

Madang and Wewak? To have a mountain here would also be all right for a breeze and nice view.’” The Tinpis Run movie was played three times and people were repeating the jokes from the film during their everyday interactions. I thought of arɨm ‘skin’ and wambung ‘insideness’ and their mutual engagement when watching the films. Skin-body and wambung recognize the common features of the PNG life-

22 Tinpis Run (1991) is a film made by Penagau Nengo in cooperation with late Severin Blanchet. Other screened films about PNG, beside those already mentioned in the text, were: Cowboy and Maria in Town (1991), and Mist in the Mountains: HIV-AIDS in Porgera (2006).

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style while at the same time perceive the particularities of the Ambonwari expression. It was not only the familiar gestures that the villagers liked on the film, but also the environment, food, and clothes people wear. It is because of knowing the taste of a fruit, for example, seeing the same style of houses in the closest town of Wewak, hearing familiar expressions, or knowing the smell of a particular tree or plant, that the Ambonwari felt attuned to the story. An obvious destruction and confusion was inevitably created by watching the Avatar movie, for example, where all of that mentioned above is unknown, strange, and totally new.

Hence, what we see has its counterpart in what we do not see. We frame in and out because we see intentionally. Just as the body finds its limits in looking, so does the film in its framing. Laura Marks writes that “memories remain embodied in the senses even when their stimulus has disappeared... the senses are also sites of cultural expression. Sense organs are the sites where culture crosses the body”

(2000: 201). I know that Augustina and other Ambonwari will remember the images they liked and did not like from all those foreign movies we watched together. From people’s reactions to PNG productions, however, I learned more about the specificities of their social and cultural background. I often laughed at situations which were not really funny for the Ambonwari. Over the time spent watching movies together my ethnographic research has become an exchange of sensory experiences between two distinctive worlds: one characterised by an abundance of audio-visual media and the other by its virtual absence. Through all the questions and answers, as well as through silence, I realized that projections and screened movies started to initiate an exchange between different cosmologies and to create new intersubjectivities.

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Social Aspects of Collaborative Production

A special place in our village screenings involved showing the recordings that came out of our ‘collaborative production’. This included my recordings of the village, past and present, as well as peoples’ recordings made in 2011. The three cameras brought for the people were given to chosen individuals to photograph and record short clips (see Chapter Two). Because of the complexity of social organization in the village, and the primacy given to kin relationships, I chose individuals with whom I was able to socialize and work without overpowering effects of social constrains. This decision was very much unplanned but negotiated and included both my and their preferences. Adjustments, however difficult, had often to be made on the spot. For example, I planned in advance to give one of the cameras to ten-year-old Enet Yapai, whom I have known well since she was six.

Our friendship was from the beginning mediated by the camera (see Chapter Two,

Vávrová 2008). By getting the camera, Enet suddenly possessed something that others did not have. As much as I wanted her to record, she made none of the first photographs and clips. Being the lastborn child in the family and a girl, she was neither able, nor did she want, to hang on to an object of such a visibility and value.

Once the camera was brought to her house, it was immediately handled and used by her older siblings. Enet was happy and even proud of this. So, willingly or not, I had to include Enet’s eldest brother Desmond and her elder sister Glenis among those who were also making recordings with this camera. I did not object but went with the flow. Their recordings became part of my nightly screenings (i.e. see video-clips Ambonwari Recordings 01, Ambonwari Recordings 02).

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Plate 45: Autoportrait © Soroni Simi 2011

Simultaneously, another camera was given to Augustina’s sixteen-year-old son,

Soroni. I have been working on Augustina’s portrait since 2005 and thought of including another kind of ‘internal perspective’ captured by Soroni. It started very well. At the beginning, he was enthusiastic about recording, though Augustina could not stop herself from teasing him and emphasising his incapability. Just as recordings of Enet, Glenis and Desmond suddenly brought me into the private lives of children of different ages, so did Soroni’s footage disclose the lives of teenagers.

He took the camera almost every day to his rubber trees garden, when paddling with his younger brother and his best friend, a classificatory brother, to check fishing strings, baskets and nets, and when the village boys played soccer or hung around in the public meeting house of his clan. Later on, however, Soroni got reluctant to record. Being a shy person he became annoyed with the boasting behaviour of his clan-mates. In particular he disliked those making silly faces, showing their red tongues from chewing betel nuts, and constantly putting their

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thumbs up. Not wanting to offend either them or me, he provided me with a large number of self-portraits, and hid the camera whenever in the company of others.

He was somehow relieved when his eldest brother Jack arrived to the village and the entire situation changed. Another member of the family appropriated the camera.

Plate 46: Augustina Awsay watching her family story © Daniela Vávrová 2011

There were a couple of edited pieces, which I considered special and too personal to be shown in public. One of them was an unfinished story about a widow, my

‘sister’ Augustina, in whose house I was living. In order to continue with the story I wanted her to see the rough cut of the footage made during my previous visits and to talk about it. We also watched it several times with the family-house members.

Augustina openly talked about her hardship and did not hide her thoughts about

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those who she believed had wronged her. In our one-to-one conversation she opened up and revealed several confidential matters which we both thought would be better kept to ourselves.

Another edited piece was the portrait of Enet, mentioned earlier. I invited Enet and her older sister, Glenis, to watch the film on the computer in my house. They were both very attentive and serious, observing the computer as much as the film. They laughed at a few scenes but kept their voices down. To do something in private as we did could easily be taken as conspiracy, as if we were making some secret plans or hiding something. At the end of the film, Enet said not to show it to others except her parents. She would feel embarrassed if other villagers laughed at her.

Later on we watched the film again together with her mother, Alexia, and father,

Samson, in their house. They both agreed that Enet spoke to me very openly, though only when the two of us were alone. While watching, they commented:

“Benjamin made this paddle”, “it’s high tide”, “this is the fire place”, “this is the crown of the sago palm”, “Alexia smoked before, now she doesn’t”, “Enet is putting sago flour into the baskets”, “cockatoos are calling”. While Samson and Alexia were making comments, Enet kept a rather serious face and focused on the story and her behaviour on the screen. She asked: “What is this place where we were processing sago?” Alexia replied: “We processed sago at Yambangmar.” When seeing children in the film playing marbles under the house, Alexia asked: “Whose house is this?” “Ours”, replied Enet. When Alexia was beating the grass for making baskets and there was only a close-up on her hands, Samson asked: “Alexia, where are you beating the grass?” Alexia replied: “Near our public meeting house.”

These kinds of observations, endlessly repeated during informal discussions, were

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characteristic of everyday life in the village. Alexia became especially aware that over the years we became too close and that some villagers were already gossiping about us. Being all the time with the ‘white people’ made others jealous.

They talked around that Alexia and her family were coming to see me only because they wanted something from me. These expressions of jealousy were not new for us. A year before my fieldwork she got seriously sick. Some men who were present at the healing ceremony heard about a photograph, which I had sent to Alexia a few years ago. It was her portrait. The men, however, did not see only Alexia on this photograph, but also the spirit of the village (see Chapter Two). She, as a woman, was not allowed to see this spirit. Some men maintained the photograph should be destroyed. I asked several elder members about this photograph, but no one seemed to know where it was. No one knew what actually happened to it. I have not seen it. Later on, when I tried to question Alexia about it again, she did not want to talk about the event and the photograph at all. She admitted that she is afraid to speak about this issue, not to awake the spirit of the village again.

Because of all this I decided not to show the faces of Alexia’s family too often during our public night screenings.

Seeing Oneself

The most desired images to be watched were recordings of the Ambonwari themselves. My footage from previous years included edited sequences, between fifteen minutes and one hour in length, about the Catholic Charismatic movement, the kurang ceremony, better known as naven among the Iatmul (Bateson 1958

[1936]), fishing by poisoning the water in the creek, hunting by the burning of grassland, processing sago and collecting the grass for baskets and mats, acting

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‘disco drama’, travelling from Ambonwari to Wewak, and also visiting Ambonwari living in Lae in 2008. Several nights people watched just these DVDs. Responses to recordings were in the majority enchanting, even flattering about the good looks of the villagers and their surroundings. The requests for recording or photographing were growing and I was often called to record people during particular social events. Some were shy to be the centre of attention and rather stayed at the back or out of the frame. Only a few people said: “I’m tired of your constant recording.”

This was usually said in public, in front of others, as they did not want to become the main subject of attention. They felt disconcerted if I paid too much attention to them while others were around. The majority of people, however, wanted to watch their relatives, both the living and the dead, and themselves in particular. They were entertaining each other about their looks and behaviour and gossiping about others’ looks and behaviour. People were very responsive to the camera-gaze and our interactions with the camera produced unforgettable moments for all of us. One night, I was told: “On the screen our place looks like a town. It’s nice. It’s much nicer on the screen than when seen with our own eyes.”

‘Karawari style’ was mentioned several times during the screenings when watching the village, nearby sago forests, local rivers and creeks, or acting of some

Ambonwari individuals. During the first projections, I followed people’s request and showed only the footage recorded by Borut Telban in 1991 and by me in 2005,

2007 and 2008. No foreign feature films were screened at those times. If in the past the images were somehow hidden inside the camera and people were wondering what I would do with them, in 2011 these same images suddenly popped out to an open place and received their full meaning. The Ambonwari were

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used to keeping the photographs of their folks in their houses. However, they were not used to seeing themselves and their closest relatives in the moving images and on a large screen. Suddenly their bodies moved and interacted. Their skin, posture, physical size and face became enlarged and more visible. They could watch particular expressions all over again. And not only that, Augustina captured the thoughts of many, when she said:

With my own eyes I am incapable of seeing myself. When I see myself in a

mirror, I will say: ‘Yes, it is true, it is me’. But this is not the same [as it is on

the screen]. I cannot see myself, someone else will tell me [what I look like],

will describe me. I cannot see my own back. Only someone else can see

me [from the back]. But only on screen I can see myself with my own

eyes.23

The people see their bodies on the screen in a different time and space than when seeing themselves in water or a mirror. To see one’s own appearance through the camera adds something new to the image of oneself. One can finally look at oneself through the eyes of the other. MacDougall’s comment fits this context when he writes that photography gives us the chance to “review our varied appearances.

It takes nothing from us; indeed, every image increases us and attests to the possibilities within us” (2006: 148). One of the Ambonwari men asked: “Are these

DVDs able to make us skinny or fat?” It was continuous self-recognition and self-

23 One of many discussions with Augustina Awsay from 13 March 2011 in Tok Pisin was written into a notebook and translated by me in 2011-2012.

> Part III 243 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

exploration that occupied the people when watching themselves during the first months of the village cinema. Therefore:

We do not ‘lose ourselves’ in the film, so much as we exist – emerge, really

– in the contact between our body and the film’s body. It is not a matter

simply of identifying with the characters on screen, or with the body of the

director or camera operator, for example. Rather, we are in a relationship of

intimate, tactile, reversible contact with the film’s body – a complex

relationship that is marked as often by tension as by alignment, by repulsion

as often as by attraction. We are embedded in a constantly mutual

experience with the film, so that the cinematic experience is the experience

of being both ‘in’ our bodies and ‘in’ the liminal space created by that

contact (Barker 2009: 19).

Another issue beside the bodies and external appearances (both subsumed under

Karawari concepts of arɨm ‘skin’ and saria ‘face’) that grabbed the Ambonwari’s attention was seeing the dead relatives. When showing the footage made in 2007 and 2008, I was told by some not to show it to those who still mourn for their recently deceased sons and daughters, and brothers and sisters. Others, however, wanted to see them. People’s demands of what to watch varied enormously. It was quite different with the older Telban’s uncut footage from 1991 made of three parts: collective fishing in the grassland, hunting of pigs by burning of grassland, and singing and dancing of the neighbouring Imanmeri in Ambonwari. Because of the temporal distance of twenty years, everyone was excited to see how the village and the people looked in the past: some were small children at that time, others

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were not even born yet. The audience was loudly recognizing the faces, explaining who is who, and telling the children what is their kin relation to a deceased person appearing on the screen. Nazeria and Jowen could not recognize themselves and said that others had to tell them when they appeared on the screen. Nazeria commented: “How could we recognize ourselves when we don’t see ourselves?”

As it was somehow anticipated, several people commented that their dead relatives actually live with us in Europe and Australia. When Bapra saw her late father, she said: “He is all right now. He is in Brisbane.” This went hand in hand with my experience from 2008, when I was given a few letters addressed to people’s dead relatives. In the letters, the senders asked the spirits of their dead mother and grandfather for common things such as, for example, paying school fees for their son, or buying trousers, shoes, or a radio. The Ambonwari not only continually discover meanings in what they see but they make sure that meanings which they consciously and unconsciously want to see are already inscribed in seeing. Specific cultural interpretation is inseparable from actuality and leads people into specific conclusions. As Sobchack writes: “[P]erception is always already the expression of intentionality in the world and, as such, always already a judgement, and interpretation” (1992: 69-70). Actuality is therefore not some objective reality but reality, which is real for the subject in relation to somebody or something. It is in these terms that the Ambonwari’s perception of people and events in the movies should be understood.

Seeing themselves became inseparable from seeing their dead, the spirits, the spirits of the dead, and the ‘whites’ generally. This seeing oneself simultaneously involves seeing the other. Otherness is thus imbued in sameness. The majority of

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observations that the Ambonwari had while watching the foreign movies were about ‘who was it’ in a form of ‘from which country’, ‘black or white skin’. When watching PNG productions and themselves in particular, the answers they were looking for were not only ‘who was it’, but also ‘who did it’ and especially ‘where was it’. From these observations we can talk about being attuned to the watched particularities. Obviously, in foreign films this attuning was missing. The process of getting in step with the screened films thus created discrepancies between detachment and attachment, embodied and disembodied perception, between

‘what’ and ‘who’, known and unknown, and between ‘here’ and ‘where’.

> Part III 246 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

CONCLUSION: Towards New Horizons

In December 2010, when I began my fieldwork in the Ambonwari village, with a focus on audio-visual ethnography, I was already aware of the people’s adage arɨm sambɨs ngandɨkɨm kwandɨkas ngandɨkɨm ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’ from my previous visits to the area. I knew that for the Ambonwari, seeing and hearing are the two most important sensory modalities. Throughout my fieldwork, however, people repeatedly argued that precedence goes to the eyes. As I have discussed in this thesis, hearing is simply not reliable enough. Hearing can be deceptive.

Everything needs to be seen for ‘truth’ to be recognized and confirmed. Moreover, as I shown in previous chapters, through seeing one initiates relationships by the exchange of perspectives.

Taking the lead from visual anthropology I decided to explore the Ambonwari vision through the use of camera and film. From the beginning I was convinced that this approach should not be one-sided, involving only detached observation and recording merely people’s doings and sayings. From the start I wanted to include the Ambonwari in a kind of an audio-visual dialogue. Such a dialogic relationship does not refer only to the intimacy between the cameraperson and the filmed person – although I would argue that this is one of the most important issues when making an ethnographic film – but also to the exchange of roles. I gave cameras to the people and together we watched and discussed our work. What I was aiming for was ‘exchange of vision’, something that Viveiros de Castro (2012) and Marilyn

Strathern (2013) call ‘exchange of perspectives’.

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As I have shown throughout the previous chapters, this ‘exchange of vision’ fell on fertile ground. The Ambonwari, in their rituals, trances, dreams, and visions, are capable of exchanging their skin and seeing the world from different perspectives.

The ‘exchange of vision’ was something they would expect to occur from watching any film. For them, it was rather like exchanging secrets from their dreams.

Moreover, as vision includes, for the Ambonwari, two interrelated domains, two intertwined sides of a single perceptive mode, the visible and the invisible, I soon discovered that what they saw, especially in the foreign movies, was not taken at face value but was rather perceived through their own analysis of the visual and exploration of the hidden truth. People constantly tried to unveil subtle and hidden matters, which in their view had remained hidden from the viewer, because they were kept invisible. Thus, while I was focused on the exchange of the visible they were more preoccupied with the elicitation and exchange of the invisible. Such a perspective was steeped in a deeper cosmological realm, which placed me, a

‘white woman with a camera’, in a particular role, the complexity of which slowly unfolded over time. As occurs elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, I was aligned with the world of the ‘white people’, i.e. the spirits of the dead. As I explain in Part I and

III, this put me into a position where I should have full access to the invisible world the people were talking about. And if an ‘exchange of vision’ was to take place, I, and my camera, should be a link between two interrelated domains of a single

‘white people’s world, the visible one and the invisible one. This realization, supported by many examples throughout my thesis, led to the main argument in my thesis: the Ambonwari were neither watching the movies nor recording them for entertainment, education or exchange of goods, but were trying to initiate a dialogue, an ‘exchange of vision’, focusing on the invisible in particular.

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The Ambonwari were not passively watching different cultural worlds, but rather they actively searched these worlds for recognizable sameness and for hidden otherness. Their view of exchange went well beyond a simple collaboration between researchers and their hosts, and well beyond the exchange of different perspectives through discussions, as it is usually done in collaborative projects.

What they were searching for was how to perceive through the skin and eyes of the other (a ‘white person’, for example). Watching the foreign films brought forth not simply some kind of appreciative acceptance of a visual gift in the form of a video, but rather it created uncertainty by their inability to traverse the boundary between the visible world seen in the films and the invisible world, which in their view lay behind, and enabled, their creation. In short they searched for meanings, which should relate to a single cosmological realm, where visible and invisible domains were not in a mutually exclusive opposition, but constituted each other and were part of each other. In other words, the visible can only be understood through the invisible and the invisible can only be accessed and speculated about through the visible.

The screenings of films in the village created a particular situation where a film could actually be compared to a dream; where things are seen as real as they are in a state of being awaken. There was a difference, however, between a dream and a film. In a dream, people explained, the spirit of the dreaming person could get some important information and could engage in relationships and exchanges, which seemed impossible while watching films. In a dream one could encounter both visible and invisible domains of one’s existence. When watching PNG productions or recordings made in the village, the Ambonwari watched their own

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‘black people’, easily recognized their actions, and did not search for some secret knowledge or power. In the case of foreign movies, they watched the world of

‘white people’, the world of spirits of the dead. They wondered where exactly this

‘white people’s world was. In their dreams, many saw it as lying in the underground. This underworld was filled with cars rushing around, huge buildings and strong light. It looked exactly like the ‘white people’s world in both dreams and foreign movies. The beings – people or spirits – in that world that the Ambonwari saw, did things in a certain way and had certain knowledge and powers, which were neither revealed to, nor exchanged with, the Ambonwari regardless of their continuous attempt to use different means to contact their own spirits of the dead.

Ambonwari healers, Catholics and Catholic charismatic leaders were able to see

Jesus and the Virgin Mary in their dreams as if they were on video, and they watched the ‘white people’ on video as if they were in a dream. While dreams often revealed something to them, as outlined in Chapter Four, this was much harder to get from watching the foreign films, as discussed in Chapter Five. People generally saw many important things in their video-like dreams or visions, met spirits who often appeared as ‘white people’ and were even able to get hold of some secrets which in their view led to the materialization of things (see Part II). ‘White people’ in their dreams and visions never reveal all the secrets, nor easily give away things they possess. Some receive God’s number and are able to get in direct contact with Him. Others, the healers, for example, were able to communicate with different spirits and actually got into physical contact with them. They extracted objects, traversing the boundaries between invisible and visible domains, and showed them to their patients and their relatives. In my thesis I present several case studies showing how people dealt and communicated with the spirits of the bush. They

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remain attached to the land, and the spirits of the dead and some who first float around before leaving their places of origin to join others in the world of the ‘white people’. All these accounts, with a constant reference to ‘white people’, show how the social life of the people and their spirits is tightly interwoven, and how the visible and invisible domains of a single cosmological realm are perceived within

Ambonwari surroundings. In their own setting the Ambonwari know how to deal with the invisible dimension of their lives. They always put a great emphasis on communication with the invisible world and the exchange of skills otherwise unavailable to the ordinary human beings. People’s comments about the screenings of different versions of a film about Jesus of Nazareth showed how they attached special capabilities, knowledge, and power to the ‘white people’. Only the first screening of the film was in their view the real one. It was then that the real

Jesus was crucified. This was not simply because the film was screened by the bishop as a head of Church, but mainly because the bishop was a ‘white man’. My screenings were also perceived as more ‘real’ than those by other villagers.

Looking at many examples presented throughout my whole thesis I draw the conclusion that the main boundary, which preoccupies Ambonwari people’s thoughts and feelings, lies between being ‘black’ and being ‘white’, between being a human being and being a spirit. This boundary is between sameness and otherness, between identity and alterity, between presence and new horizons, between day and night, but all are based on the separation between the visible and invisible domains of their lives.

Another issue which appeared over and again in my audio-visual research in

Ambonwari, was that despite the more egalitarian relationship between men and women – due to the Catholic Church, the Catholic charismatic movement, and the

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abandonment of practices connected to the men’s house – women were still forbidden from seeing certain things. I have described two key examples in my thesis: one is related to the appearance of the spirit of the land on which the village is erected in a photograph I made, and another is related to the same spirit apparently appearing in my footage. In both cases there was a warning: in the first instance the woman who had received the photograph became sick and in my second example my camera broke down. Although I had certain privileges as a

‘white woman’, my eyes nevertheless were not allowed to see everything, especially from the invisible domain of traditional Ambonwari lore, which used to be under the exclusive control of men. This was especially so after I and my cameras received village names and became subsumed under the customary law regulated by the local spirits of the surrounding land and creeks. Following these and some other examples one could say that vision is gendered, which means that there are visible and invisible domains, which pertain only to men, and there are those, which pertain only to women.

The cosmological distinction between visible and invisible has its counterpart in people’s perception of living beings. A spirit can embody many skins and thus perceive the world through many eyes and ears. An invisible spirit holds an invisible wambung (insideness, understanding) capable of managing and making use of all these different perspectives. While a spirit provides a being with life, it is external arɨm (skin), which is visible and can see and hear, and it is internal wambung (insideness, understanding), which is invisible but influences how what is seen and heard is interpreted. Skin, with all its senses, and wambung, with its understanding, feelings and thoughts, shape each other and communicate with each other. Thus, in the social life of people and spirits, the invisible wambung is

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revealed mainly through its skin and the way of doing things, its care and generosity in particular. While the Ambonwari are able to exchange their ‘black’ skins for ‘white’ ones – even if this happens only after death – they simultaneously question what has happened to the ‘white people’s wambung and its expected care and generosity. They are searching for this in the invisible domain – wambung of

‘white people’ – trying to initiate a dialogue and the exchange of things and know- how, which in their view, remains unduly invisible. Thus, the Ambonwari ways of seeing not only generate exchange of perspectives, but also activate relationships

(Strathern 2013: 121; Viveiros de Castro 2012: 77).

As is the case with Papua New Guineans generally, relationships are of a key importance for the Ambonwari. It is only through relationships that the social milieu works, an individual exists, and things happen. However, these relationships have to be created, re-created, and preserved in order to function. It is in this kind of context that my cameras were perceived as mediators, catalysts, and initiators of relations, going beyond my immediate presence. This mediation between what was captured and what was communicated, was expected both from me as a camerawoman and from those Ambonwari to whom I had given cameras to record.

The invisible audience was constantly at the back of their minds. While I was more concerned with the question of how to convey their sensory experiences in my recordings, they were more concerned with the question of how to introduce themselves to the potential audience, to the significant other, and to facilitate relations with the potential viewer. In order to do this they first needed to adopt me and my cameras – by giving us names and establishing our local kin and social relations – and then to take care that their perspective was preserved on video. In their recordings the Ambonwari presented themselves as happy people, living in a

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rich environment with an abundance of food and betel nuts. The question of any kind of hierarchy was largely absent from these recordings that were made mainly by the young. They showed how they care for each other, how they fish, hunt, play, and work together, and how they share things. They wanted to show how they are not some backward people from the bush, some kanaka (savages) as they would say in Tok Pisin, but rather how successful they are in bringing all sorts of things to the village, and making it, in their view, appear like a town. They wanted to show that there is no kanambringgra (miserable person) in the village. This was their visual statement about themselves directed at both me and the invisible audience, to whom, they expected, I would show their recordings. It was their gift to the invisible other.

I took their lead in my own creation of the film ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’ accompanying my thesis by avoiding a particular narrative and avoiding trying to explain the complexity of social life. By following an interactive camera mode, the film shows how a person perceives and communicates with the external world through seeing and hearing. It is an exploration into the sensory experience of place and time. It explores the limits of sensory mediation through the screen while at the same time playing with the infinite possibilities of stimulation and interconnectedness of the senses feasible only through the film experience. I decided that the images, edited and put in juxtaposition in a specific way, should speak for themselves and address the senses rather than cognition. I tried to give primacy to perception without any a priori judgments or demands for understanding. I wanted the viewer first to see and hear and then to think. In the world saturated with images, I wanted the viewer to pay attention to the visual and auditory, to use their senses, and not to skip over the film as if it was just another

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audio-visual narrative among many others. By using the long camera takes, I wanted to give time to the senses of the viewer to adjust to a foreign environment and its pace, to see and hear the Ambonwari world. Someone who did not grow up in a particular culture, or was not initiated into it through his or her long residence with the people, can have problems not only with the invisible but also with the visible domains of other people’s lives. Thus, I would argue, in the case of a film we often need to rely merely on our senses. The dialogic approach is therefore as much about sensory experience as it is about its communicative dimension. The mutual understanding and misunderstanding are parts of this dialogue. Besides the film, there are several short videos integrated into the written text as well as slideshows with the audio, photographs, and drawings made by me and the

Ambonwari people. These audio-visual productions place the reader in a concrete environment of actual interactions and appearances of people. Whereas some of these productions were made by the Ambonwari themselves, the film is rendering my journey in the Ambonwari worlds. The film represents a particular point of view creating a unity. I was able to change the ‘skin’ and gain a new perspective for delivering an audio-visual journey of my lived experience in Ambonwari to a

Western audience. Thus, the entire work is a combination of several levels and views of my and the Ambonwari’s experience and perception of the world. Without these audio-visual counterparts, the written text would, in my view, lack a significant part in its portrayal of the Ambonwari world of senses.

It was by initiating an ‘exchange of vision’, a dialogue through recording and watching, that the Ambonwari engaged with my research inquiry. Their appearance on the screen felt as if it was a direct address to the audience. In the same way they felt about the foreign movies shown to them. The Ambonwari often noted that

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in a film, one sees an actual person, movement, and surroundings, regardless of spoken language which does not need to be understood. Through recording their places and practices, the Ambonwari demonstrated where their land is, what it looks like, and what they usually do during the day. The image became a concrete visible link between the cameraperson’s wambung and wambung of the viewer.

The Ambonwari recognized the power and plausibility of the image. By letting them contribute to the composition of my thesis, with their questions about seen movies and their own drawings and recordings, I found myself looking through Ambonwari eyes. My recordings and writings communicate with theirs, and thus create a new horizon in understanding each other’s social and cultural specificities.

It is through the senses and their communication with wambung that one, in trying to understand the world around oneself, encounters the difference between sameness and otherness (Sartre 1957, Deleuze 2005 [1985]). Otherness, however, is an inseparable part of sameness. They depend on each other, and they are created by one another. Otherness is intrinsic to sameness just as the invisible is intrinsic to the visible. Following Jean Rouch, in Chapter Two, I argued for the necessity of an ethnographic filmmaker becoming the other in a process in which the other becomes a part of the filmmaker. In other words, the filmmaker and the filmed person need to exchange their skins, perceptions and perspectives.

Through this process of becoming another – a familiar equation for the Ambonwari who can enter the skins of their ancestors, namesakes, spirits, animals, and so on

– the filmmaker and the filmed person then together create the audio-visual ‘truth’ through the camera, a catalyst and transmitter of two related poles. The camera mode goes beyond a simple portrayal or an interaction. It reflects the invisible, which is usually out of the frame. Thus, the exchange of ‘skins’ for the Ambonwari,

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whether between a man and his totemic animal or between the filmmaker and the filmed, is simultaneously an exchange of perspectives, cosmologies, and intersubjectivities.

I began my research with the question of how perception changes through wambung (understanding) and how wambung changes according to seeing and hearing. For the Ambonwari, one engages with the world through one’s arɨm (skin) and sensory experience. For them, ‘Skin has Eyes and Ears’. I argue that if visual anthropologists, in a world overloaded by images, want to see and enter into the invisible domain of other people’s lives, they need to rediscover vision. This rediscovery requires a certain resistance to the hegemony of vision embedded in the globalizing trends of market oriented productions and the multimedia, saturated with culturally specific audio-visual information. This can be achieved, firstly, by not overloading the senses so that the viewer can experience a feeling of being ‘there’, together with what is seen on the screen. Secondly, the binary opposition between the visible and invisible domains should carry within it the possibility of their unity, of the unity which enabled their differentiation in the first place. As long as the invisible is perceived as a separate domain from the visible, this is much harder to achieve. It is because the foreign films often lack this kind of unity, or because it remains invisible to them, that the Ambonwari were searching for the invisible domain within them. Following people’s perspective one could say that the hegemony of vision in the world shows itself through the creation of a radical dichotomy and hierarchy between the visible and invisible domains of people’s lives. Within this dichotomy, then, the visible dominates, losing sight of the invisible.

Thirdly, an ethnographic film should allow the viewer not only to perceive the visible, but to see oneself as being the one who sees. In other words, one should

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not give priority only to what is seen but should also think of the one who sees and needs to relate to what he or she sees. If we would rethink all these different aspects of seeing and being seen, the rediscovery of vision, in audio-visual anthropology and the ethnographic filmmaking in particular, would broaden our horizons in exploration of different modes of perception and expression.

Plate 47: A Struggle for Horizon with a quote from Merleau-Ponty (1964). Diary nr. 5 © Daniela Vávrová 2011

> Conclusion 258 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

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Virilio, P. (1994) The Vision Machine, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (1998) ‘Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism’,

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 469-488.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2012) ‘Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and

Elsewhere’, Masterclass Series 1, HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, Manchester.

Wardlow, H. (1996) ‘Bobby Teardrops: A Turkish video in Papua New Guinea.

Reflections on Cultural Studies, Feminism and the Anthropology of Media’, Visual

Anthropology Review, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 30-46.

Wassmann, J. (1991) The Song to the Flying Fox: The Public and Esoteric Knowledge of the Important Men of Kand-gei about Totemic Songs, Names, and Knotted Chords

(Middle Sepik, Papua New Guinea), Papua New Guinea: National Research Institute.

Willmott, D. (2008) ‘On DVD: The Red Balloon’, Filmcritic. [Online] Available from: http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/1956/the-red-balloon/. [Accessed: 11 June 2012].

Wright, C. (2004) ‘Material and Memory: Photography in the Western Solomon

Islands’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 73-85.

282 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Wood, M. (2006) ‘Kamula Accounts of Rambo and the State of Papua New Guinea’,

Oceania, vol. 76, no. 1, pp. 61-82.

Worth, S. & Adair, J. (1970) ‘Navajo Filmmakers’, American Anthropologist, vol. 72, pp.

9-34.

Worth, S. & Adair, J. (1972) Through Navajo Eyes, Bloomington: Indiana University

Press.

Young, M. (1971) Fighting With Food, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, M. (1998) Malinowski ́s Kiriwina: Fieldwork Photography 1915-1918, Chicago:

The University of Chicago Press.

283 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Filmography

Avatar. (2009) Animated Film, Directed by James Cameron, USA: Twentieth Century

Fox Film Corporation, 162 minutes.

Cabascabo. (1968) Film by Oumarou Gandha, Niger/France, 45 minutes.

Chronicle of a Summer. (1960) Film by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, France: Argos

Films, 85 minutes.

Cowboy and Maria in Town. (1991) Documentary by Les McLaren and Annie Stiven,

Australia, 59 minutes.

Gandhi’s Children. (2008) Ethnographic Film by David MacDougall, Australia: Ronin

Films, 185 minutes.

Ghanaian Video Tales. (2004) Documentary by Tobias Wendl, Germany: Arcadia

Filmproduction, 58 minutes.

Jaguar. (1957-1967) Ethnographic Fiction Film by Jean Rouch, France: Les Films de la Pléiade, 110 minutes.

Jesus of Nazareth. (1977) Television Series, Directed by Franco Zeffirelli, UK/Italy, 382 minutes in total.

284 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Jungle Woman. (1926) Film, Directed by Frank Hurley, Australia: Frank Hurley

Productions, 67 minutes.

Kokoda Frontline and Tobruk. (2008) Two Documentaries by Damien Parer, Australia:

Cinesound-Movietone Productions, 72 and 45 minutes.

Koriam’s Law and the Dead Who Govern. (2005) Ethnographic Film by Gary Kildea,

Andrea Simon, and Andrew Lattas, Canberra: The Australian National University and

New York: Arcadia Pictures, 110minutes.

Léon. (1994) Film by Luc Besson, France: Gaumont, 110 minutes.

Moi, un Noir. (1958) Film by Jean Rouch, France: Les Films de la Pléiade, 70 minutes.

Mist in the Mountains: HIV-AIDS in Porgera. (2006) Documentary by National Catholic

Family Life and Melanesian Institute, 36 minutes.

Ngat is Dead. (2009) Film by Christian Suhr, Steffen Dalsgaard, and Ton Otto,

Denmark: Moesgaard Film, 59 minutes.

Pearls and Savages aka Headhunters of Unknown Papua. (1921) Film by Frank

Hurley, Australia: Frank Hurley Productions, 56 minutes.

285 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Sinmia. (1985-1987) Ethnographic Film by Kumain Kolain, France/Papua New Guinea:

Yumi Productions, 45 minutes.

Slumdog Millionaire. (2008) Film by Danny Boyle, United Kingdom: Celador Films, 120 minutes.

The Book of Eli. (2010) Film by Albert Hughes, USA: Alcon Entertainment, 118 minutes.

The Red Balloon. (1956) Film by Albert Lamorisse, France: Films Montsouris, 34 minutes.

The 400 Blows. (1959) Film by Francois Truffaut, France: Les Films du Carrosse, 99 minutes.

Taking Pictures. (1996) Documentary by Les McLaren and Annie Stiven, Papua New

Guinea, 56 minutes.

The Terminator. (1984) Film, Directed by James Cameron, UK/USA: Hemdale Film,

107 minutes.

Them and Me. (2001) Documentary by Stéphane Breton, France: Arte, 63 minutes.

Tinpis Run. (1991) Film by Pengau Nengo, France: AJBA Production, 94 minutes.

286 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Titanic. (1997) Film, Directed by James Cameron, USA: Twentieth Century Fox Film

Corporation, 194 minutes.

Tourou and Bitti: The Drums of the Past. (1971) Ethnographic Film by Jean Rouch,

France: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 12 minutes.

Towards Baruya Manhood. (1969-1972) Ethnographic Film by Ian Dunlop, Maurice

Godelier, Film Australia, 7 hours and 45 minutes.

Walk into Paradise. (1956) Film by Lee Robinson, Australia: Southern Films

International, 93 minutes.

287 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Audio CD

Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea. (2001) Recorded by Feld, S., USA:

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and PNG: Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies.

Archival Resources and anonymous

Pacific Islands Monthly. (1956) ‘Pistols at Dawn or the Rio Grande is Patrons’ Choice’,

The Cinema and the Native, contributed, September, pp. 131-133.

Media Catalogue

Medienkatalog Ethnologie Australien/Ozeanien. (1997) Göttingen: Institut für den

Wissenschaftlichen Film (IWF).

288 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

APPENDIX 1:

AUDIO-VISUAL EQUIPMENT

VIDEO CAMERA EQUIPMENT:

Sony HD Video camera HVR-V1E (Ambonwari name: Sanggwanda) Wide angle conversion lens x0,8 VCL-HG0862 Sennheiser microphone ME66 (K6 system, shotgun, xlr connector) Sennheiser microphone ME64 (K6 system, cardioid, xlr connector) Sennheiser wireless system EW 112-P G3 XLR connector cables extra 3m and 5 m long Batteries InfoLithium (4x NP-F970 + 3x NP-F770 + 1x NP-F570) Sony Adaptor/Charger AC-VQ1050D.CEE (DCC-VQ1 Cord, and wall outlet cord) Røde microphone shotgun shock mount (SM3 – hot shoe, flexibility for directions) Rycote mini windjammer (special 190 mm) Sony Head Cleaner Tape (Sony-DVM12CL) 2x Memory Stick Pro HG Duo (8 GB) 100x Panasonic tape DV advanced master 63 minutes (AYDVM63AMQ) 10x extra reserve Sony HD mini DV tapes 63 minutes (3DVM63HD) 1x 1520 Pelican hard case (45.5 x 32.4 x 17.1 cm) 1x 1400 Pelican hard case (30.5 x 23 x 13.1 cm)

STILL CAMERA EQUIPMENT:

Nikon FM3A 35 mm SLR analogous camera (Ambonwari name: Krmanjua) AF Nikkor lens 50 / 1,4D (possible to use with digital body) Macro rings (13, 21 & 31 mm) Promaster UV filter (52 mm) Circular polarizer filter (52 mm) 20x B&W negatives (Kodak C41 Professional ISO 400 CN, ILFORD Delta ISO 100 Professional, ILFORD HP5 Plus ISO 400, each 135-36 exposures)

Appendix 1 289 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Nikon D700 digital camera AF-S Nikkor lens 24-70 / 2,8 G-ED DHG Lens protect filter (77 mm) Circular polarizer filter (77 mm) 2x SanDisk Extreme Compact Flash card (16GB) 2x Nikon Li-ion rechargeable batteries (EN-EL3e) Nikon multi-power battery pack MB-D10 (AA batteries)

EQUIPMENT FOR THE PEOPLE:

1x Sanyo Xacti VPC-WH1 (water and shock proof), 2x rechargeable batteries (Ambonwari name given by Enet Yapai: Mɨndanggi) 2x Panasonic Lumix digital still camera 14.1 MP with film mode (water and shock proof), 4x rechargeable batteries (Ambonwari name: Siarmay) Panasonic SD memory cards 6x 8GB

EQUIPMENT FOR PROJECTIONS AND EDITING IN THE FIELD:

Generator YAMAHA EF 2600 (clean petrol) Petrol (around 176 gallons throughout the year) Regulator for external charging (surge protector UPS 600VA/375W) Projectors (1st projector’s lamp burned out because of using an old generator without a proper surge protector; 2 more projectors were sent to me, but one of them was not working when they arrived. I left the good one in the village; the 3rd projector was Acer X1161 which I brought back with me to Australia) Apple MacBook Pro 13” (2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3, 320 GB drive at 5400 rpm, super-drive 8x) Avid Media Composer Academic (editing program) LaCie Rugged mobile external hard drives 1x 500 GB + 2x 1TB USB Corsair flash drives 2x 16 GB + 1x 2 GB

Appendix 1 290 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

SUPPLEMENTARY EQUIPMENT:

Sony linear PCM D50 audio recorder, AA batteries with windscreen ADPCM1 (Ambonwari name: Sunggwinja) Tripod Manfrotto 128 RC (head) + 190 D (legs) Varizoom VZ-1 Shooter shoulder-mount for camera Litepanels micro LED light, AA batteries, hot shoe mount Sennheiser HD 62 TV headphones eSun 1200 Solar Panel 12W / 12 V (new 25W available from a friend) Folding reflectors: diameter 80cm (gold, silver, transparent, black) Sony rechargeable battery 4 pack for AA and AAA batteries 2x Dry bags Cordura 35 L + 1x eVent Compression Dry Sacks 20 L Kata shoulder bag for HDV camera Lowepro backpack for still camera and everyday use Silica gel: reusable self indicating moisture absorber (2 kg) Gaffer tape Additional cables

Appendix 1 291 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

APPENDIX 2:

KARAWARI TERMS FOR BODY PARTS

ARɨM (PL.: ARɨMBAS) SKIN, BODY KANAPANG (PL.: KANAPANGGI) HEAD PARINKWANDUM TEMPLE, SIDE OF HEAD (PL.: PARINKWANDUMBAS) SUNGGWIN KANAPANG CROWN AND TOP BACK PART OF HEAD SARIAN KANAPANG FOREHEAD, FRONT PART OF HEAD KANAPANGGɨN KWARɨMBRI TWO HALVES OF HEAD (KWARɨM ‘PIECE OF SOMETHING’) WAMBANG (PL.: WAMBANGGI) FOREHEAD WAPɨS (SG.: WAPɨSɨM) HAIR SAMBɨS (ONLY IN PLURAL) EYES SAMBɨN ARɨM (PL.: SAMBɨN ARɨMBAS) EYELID/EYELASH, EYEBROW (LIT.: ‘SKIN OF EYES’) NGGURUNG (PL.: NGGURUNGGI) EYEBALL ANGURINGAK NGGURUNG WHITE SCLERA IN EYE WURUKUPɨSAK NGGURUNG IRIS, BLACK CIRCLE IN EYE SANJA APASɨK NGGURUNG CATARACT, WHITE COVERED EYEBALL WAMBAMBANɨNG PUPIL (PL.: WAMBAMBANɨNGGI) SAMBɨSɨN YANGI (PL.: SAMBɨSɨN HOLE WHERE EYE IS, EYE CAVITY YANGɨR) (YANGI ‘CLAY POT’)

IPɨN (PL.: IPɨNDI) NOSE IPɨN WANANɨNG (PL.: IPɨN WANANɨNGGI) TIP OF NOSE IPɨN ANDINJAY NASAL-BONE (ANDINJAY ‘MARROW’) (PL.: IPɨN ANDINJAYNGGAR) ANDINJAY (PL.: ANDINJAYNGGAR) MEDULLA, MARROW (IN THE BACK- BONE); SAGO SPROUT (LIT.: ‘BREAST OF EARTH’, ‘MILK OF EARTH’)

292 Appendix 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

INGRɨNG (PL.: INGRɨNGGI) NOSTRIL SAMBIANG (PL.: SAMBIARɨM) SNIVEL ANDUK (PL.: ANDUKWAS) MOUTH YIP (PL.: YIPɨMBAS) LIP, LOWER AND UPPER PART OF MOUTH MɨMINYING (PL.: MɨMINYINGGI) TONGUE

PAMBɨN MɨMINYING ROOT OF TONGUE SɨSɨNG (PL.: SɨSɨNGGI) TOOTH ARɨNGAK (PL.: ARɨNGAKɨS) BACK TOOTH, MOLAR KASɨMAPɨNɨNG (PL.: KASɨMAPɨNɨNGGI) CHIN, JAW, CHIN WITH CHEEK KASɨNGANG (PL.: KASɨNGANGGI) CHEEK KASA (PL.: KASI) CHIN SɨSɨNGGɨS KASA JAW WITH TEETH KɨKɨNAK (PL.: KɨKɨNAKɨS) BONE CIRCLING THE EYE or SAMBɨSɨN KɨKɨNAK PɨKRɨNG (PL.: PɨKRɨNGGI) NECK KWANDɨKAS (ONLY IN PLURAL) EARS KWANDɨKɨN YAMBANDANG EAR HOLE (PL.: KWANDɨKɨN YAMBANDANGGI) KWANDɨKɨNDɨR EAR-DRUM, MEMBRANE IN EAR (PL.: KWANDɨKɨNDɨRNGGAR) SAMɨN (ONLY IN SINGULAR) BRAIN, MARROW IN BONES; YELLOW GREASY WAX IN EARS

SAMɨN YIMBI (PL.: SAMɨN YIMBINJIMBɨR) SOFTEST PART OF BABY’S HEAD (YIMBI ‘BASKET FOR WASHING SAGO’) SAMBɨNɨM (PL.: SAMBɨNBAS) SHOULDER AMBING (PL.: AMBINGGI) SHOULDER BLADE (ALSO BREADFRUIT, BALL, ETC.)

AMBINGGINYA WAPɨS APASɨKɨN HAIR (IS) GROWING ON SHOULDER BLADE YAMIM (PL.: YAMIMBAS) BACK OF NECK, BACK OF HEAD SɨMBAPAM (PL.: SɨMBAPAMBAS) or CHEST, BREAST-BONE CHEST (LIT.: ‘FISHING BASKET, FISHING

293 Appendix 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

SɨMBANG (PL.: SɨMBANGGI) TRAP’) MAYNG (PL.: MAYNGGI) RIB-BONE MAYNGGɨSɨM (PL.: MAYNGGɨSɨMBAS) RIBS, PART OF THE BODY AROUND CHEST, SIDE-SIDE OF BODY NJAY (PL.: NJAYNGGɨR) BREAST, MILK NJAYN WURɨNG (PL.: NJAYN WURɨNGGI) NIPPLE (FEMALE) (LIT.: ‘BREAST’S HOLE’)

NJAYN SANGGɨM NIPPLE (MALE) (LIT.: ‘BREAST’S CHEST’) (PL.: NJAYN SANGGɨMBAS) SAMɨNG (PL.: SAMɨNGGI) BELLY, ABDOMEN, STOMACH SAYPA (PL.: SAYPI) BELLY, STOMACH SAYPAN APANAR NAVEL, BELLY-BUTTON or SAYPAN APARAR SANɨM (PL.: SANɨMBAS) BONE, SPINE BACK-BONE PAMɨNGGɨN SANɨM THIGH-BONE KɨRɨPɨR (PL.: KɨRɨPɨRɨNGGAR) SPINE, PART OF BACK OVER SPINE, BACK-BONE KɨRɨPɨR SINGAY (PL.: KɨRɨPɨR SINGGAR) BACK-BONE, SPINE or SANɨMBɨN KɨRɨPɨR YAY (ONLY IN SINGULAR) BLOOD PɨKAM (PL.: PɨKAMBAS) ABDOMINAL AREA, HIP SɨMɨN SUMBUNA MEMBRANE BETWEEN SKUL AND BRAIN SɨMɨN (PL.: SɨMɨNIA) VEIN, BLOOD VESEL; RATTAN, CANE AKURIM (PL.: AKURIMBAS) ARM PAMBɨN AKURIM UPPER PART OF ARM MASɨR AKURIM LOWER PART OF ARM IPɨNDAMBAN AKURIM RIGHT ARM YAKRAPANJAN AKURIM LEFT ARM MANGGANGGɨSɨM FOREARM, WRIST (PL.: MANGGANGGɨSɨMBAS) YAMɨNDANG (PL.: YAMɨNDANGGI) FINGER KUPAN YAMɨNDANG THUMB (LIT.: ‘BIG FINGER’) WAMARIN YAMɨNDANG FOREFINGER

294 Appendix 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

WASAN YAMɨNDANG MIDDLE FINGER, RING FINGER (LIT.: ‘SMALL FINGER’) YANGGRI (ONLY IN PLURAL) HAND YANGGRI YUWAMBAK PALM (LIT.: ‘TURTLE OF HAND’) (PL.: YANGGRI YUWAMBAKɨS) PINDɨK (PL.: PɨNDɨKAR) JOINT ON FINGER AKUNARA (PL.: AKUNARI) ADAM’S APPLE or AMɨNGWURUM (PL.: AMɨNGWURUMBAS) MBɨNDANɨNG (PL.: MBɨNDANɨNGGI) ELBOW KɨSɨKAMANɨNG (PL.: KɨSɨKAMANɨNGGI) GROIN, ARMPIT YANGGUNDAMAN MEAT, PIECE OF MEAT, FLESH (PL.: YANGGUNDAMANIA) KAPɨS (PL.: KAPɨSAR) BUTTOCKS KAPɨSɨN YAWNGGUNDAMAN FLESH ON BUTTOCKS (PL.: KAPɨSɨN YAWNGGUNDAMANIA) KAPɨSɨN SAMBUKWA (PL.: KAPɨSɨN COCCYX, BONE ON BUTTOCKS (LIT.: SAMBUKWI) ‘TAIL OF BUTTOCKS’) KAPɨSɨN AWUNɨNG (PL.: KAPɨSɨN PELVIS, HIP AWUNɨNGGI) KAPɨSɨN ARKɨR (ONLY IN PLURAL) SLIT BETWEEN TWO HALFS ON BUTTOCKS YAWI (PL.: YAWINJI) VAGINA, FEMALE GENITALS WUSɨNG (PL.: WUSɨNGGI) PENIS ARUWA (PL.: ARUWI) PENIS OF AN ADULT MAN PɨNDɨK (PL.: PɨNDɨKNGGAR, PɨNDɨKAR) HEAD OF PENIS (LIT.: ‘JOINT, KNOB’) PANYANGGWUSɨM PENIS WITH TESTICLES (PL.: PANYANGGWUSɨMBAS) PANYANG (PL.: PANYANGGWI) TESTICLE PANDA (PL.: PANDI) FINGER NAIL, NAIL ON TOE, CLOW MɨNDI (ONLY IN PLURAL) FAECES, FART

MɨN MɨNDI MɨN AWAR HE/SHE DEFECATED (LIT.: ‘SHE/HE BOILED FAECES’) MɨNDI MɨN MBɨSɨKAN HE/SHE PASSED WIND INTESTINES WITH ANUS MɨNDI YARA INTESTINES WITH FAECES

295 Appendix 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

MɨNDɨR AKARɨNG MɨNDISINɨM (PL.: MɨNDISINBAI) ARSE-HOLE (INSULT) PAMɨNG (PL.: PAMɨNGGI) THIGH PAMBɨN PAMɨNG FRONT OF UPPER PART OF LEG PAMɨNGGɨN SANɨM (PL.: PAMɨNGGɨN THIGH-BONE, FORE-FRONT OF LEG SANɨMBAS) IMBɨNAK (PL.: IMBɨNAKɨS) KNEE YAMɨNDAM (PL.: YAMɨNDAMBAS) TOE KUPAN YAMɨNDAM BIG TOE WAMARIN YAMɨNDAM FIRST TOE (POINTER) WASAN YAMɨNDAM MIDDLE TOE, THIRD TOE, LITTLE TOE WURANGGANG (PL.: WURANGGANGGI) INNER PART OF ANKLE SAMBRɨMAK (PL.: SAMBRɨMAKɨS) OUTER PART OF ANKLE INGGUMBANUNG HILL, BACK PART OF HUMAN FOOT (PL.: INGGUMBANUNGGI) INCL. SINEW ABOVE HILL WUPɨN SɨSɨNɨNG (PL.: WUPɨN HEART (LIT. ‘SEED OF CHEST’) SɨSɨNɨNGGI) WUPɨN YARɨM (PL.: WUPɨN YARɨMBAS) LUNGS (LIT. ‘LIVER OF CHEST’) YARɨM (PL.: YARɨMBAS) LIVER WUP (PL.: WUPɨNGGAR) INTERNAL PART OF CHEST, SOFT TISSUE SURROUNDING LUNGS AND HEART WAMBUNG (PL.: WAMBUNGGAR) STERNUM, BREAST-BONE, INSIDE OF STERNUM (RELATED TO FEELING AND THINKING)

WAMBUNGGɨNA WAPɨS APASɨKɨN HAIR (IS) GROWING ON CHEST YAMUNGGWAS (ONLY IN PLURAL) FOOT, INCLUDES LEG’S LOWER PART, USED AS A GENERIC TERM FOR LEG ISINAR YAMUNGGWAS SOLE OF FOOT (LIT. ‘BOTTOM OF FOOT’) KUNDRɨMBɨN YAMUNGGWAS EDGE OF FOOT KAPAY (PL.: KAPAR) BACK OF KNEE SIAK (PL.: SIAKɨS) MUSCLE ON THE LOWER PART OF LEG FROM KNEE TO FOOT SAMɨNGGɨN SIAK MUSCLE ON LOWER LIMB (LIT. ‘BELLY MUSCLE’)

296 Appendix 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

IMAN SɨMBAPAM (PL.: IMAN CHEST-BONE WITH PLEXUS (IMAN SɨMBAPAMBAS) ‘MEN’S HOUSE; CHEST’) IMAN PINJING (PL.: IMAN PINJINGGI) PIECE/HALF OF CHEST-BONE WITH RIB- BONES SɨNDI (ONLY IN PLURAL) URINE

MɨN SɨNDI MɨN AWAR SHE URINATED (LIT.: ‘SHE BOILED URINE’) MɨN SɨNDI MɨN PASAR HE URINATED (LIT.: ‘HE RELEASED URINE’) SɨNDɨR PAM (PL.: SɨNDɨR PARAS) URETHRA, TUBE CONNECTED TO BLADDER SɨNDɨM PRIS (PL.: SɨNDɨM PRISAR) BLADDER, BILE PRIS (PL.: PRISAR) BLADDER AKARɨNG (PL.: AKARɨNGGI) INTESTINES, BOWELS, PLACENTA, UMBILICAL CORD KUPAK AKARɨNG (PL.: KUPAK LARGE INTESTINE AKARɨNGGI) WASAK AKARɨNG (PL.: WASAK SMALL INTESTINE AKARɨNGGI) YANɨNG (ONLY IN SINGULAR) FAT, GREASE YANɨNGGɨN KAMANDɨ (PL.: YANɨNGGɨN GREASY INTESTINE KAMANDɨNGGAR) IMBWANA (PL.: IMBWANI) STOMACH WITH INTESTINES IN BIRD AND CASSOWARY KAMBIANIPɨN (ONLY IN SINGULAR) GALL BLADDER, FETTY PART OF BILE ISINAR LOWER PART OF BODY (LIT.: ‘BELOW’) MAUN UPPER PART OF BODY (LIT.: ‘UP, ABOVE’) MANGWAR (ONLY IN SINGULAR) SIDE, SIDE OF BODY

297 Appendix 2 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

APPENDIX 3: LOCAL TERMS FOR FOREIGN OBJECTS

APIAMɨNDɨM (PL.: APIAMɨNDɨMBAS) BACKPACK, ANY PERSONAL BAG (ORIG.: ‘BASKET FOR CARRYING PERSONAL THINGS’) ARIAKAR MARAYM (ONLY IN SINGULAR) MIRROR (ORIG.: ‘WATER WITH GOOD OPEN VIEW’) AMBING (PL.: AMBINGGI) BALL (ORIG.: ‘CIRCULAR OR ROUND OBJECT’; ‘BREADFRUIT FRUIT’; ‘BEEHIVE’; ‘SHOULDER-BLADE’)

AWUR AMBING LAMP (ORIG.: ‘FIRE-BALL’) PARIMBɨN AMBING HELICOPTER (ORIG.: ‘BEEHIVE’) ANDAYPA (PL.: ANDAYPI) UMBRELLA, CAP, HAT, ANY COVER OVER BODY OR HEAD (ORIG.: ‘WOVEN HOOD’; ‘SHELL OF TURTLE’) ARɨMIAK (PL.: ARɨMIAKɨS) MIRROR (ORIG.: ‘REFLECTION OR IMAGE IN WATER’) ANDɨNG (PL.: ANDɨNGGAR) WRITING PEN, PAINTING BRUSH (ORIG.: ‘BRUSH MADE FROM CORDYLINE LEAVES FOR APPLYING CLAY OR FROM PANDANUS SEEDS FOR APPLYING RED LIQUID’) ANGGAM (PL.: ANGGAMɨNGGAR) PLATE, BOWL, DISH, CONTAINER FOR MAKING SAGO PUDDING ANGGɨM (PL.: ANGGɨS) ROPE, STRING, VINE ANGGɨNDARKWANAR PHOTOGRAPH, IMAGE IN MIRROR (PL.: ANGGɨNDARKWI) (ORIG.: ‘PERSONAL SPIRIT’, ‘SHADOW’) ARɨNG (PL.: ARɨNGGI) CLOTHES, T-SHIRT WITH TROUSERS, MOSQUITO NET (ORIG.: ‘SKIN REMOVED FROM BODY, HIDE’; ‘MOSQUITO BASKET’; ‘CROCODILE’S OR SNAKE’S SKIN FOR SELLING’)

PAMɨNGGɨS ARɨNG TROUSERS (ORIG.: ‘HIDE OF THIGHS’)

Appendix 3 298 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

YAKUSɨN ARɨNG BRA (ORIG.: ‘LOWER PART OF A STRING BAG’) ARɨNG YUKUM PLASTIC BAG (ORIG.: ‘HIDE-BAG’) MANDɨNG ARɨNG UNDERWEAR (ORIG.: ‘GRASS PANTS’) SHOES (ORIG.: ‘HIDES OF FEET’) YAMɨNGGWASɨN ARɨNGGI AWI (ONLY IN PLURAL) LIGHT OF LAMP (ORIG.: ‘FIRE’, ‘LIGHT OF FIRE’; ‘BURNING FEELING OF FOOD OR DRINK’, ‘SPICY’; ‘BURNING PAIN’)

PANGGAYMBɨN AWI TORCH (ORIG.: ‘LIT BUNDLE OF COCONUT LEAVES’) AWUR PINJING MATCHES, LIGHTER (ORIG.: ‘BURNING PIECE OF WOOD’) AWUR MASɨNɨNG WEAK TORCH/BATTERY (ORIG.: ‘FIRE IN A PIECE OF WOOD’) AWUR SAMBANGGAY TORCH WITH WEAK LIGHT (ORIG.: ‘LIGHT OF A FIREFLY’) AWUR SURAK TORCH WITH BATTERIES (ORIG.: ‘SHOT OF FIRE’) AWUR AMBING LAMP, LIGHT-BALL (ORIG.: ‘ROUND OBJECT OF FIRE’) AWUR SIMBIM TORCH (ORIG.: ‘TORCH MADE OF DRY COCONUT FRONDS’) ANDɨM (PL.: ANDɨMBAS) SPOON (ORIG.: ‘COCONUT SHELL SPOON’, ‘NEST, BIRD’S NEST’; ‘RUBBISH’, ‘DIRT’, ‘SCRAPING’)

KRASAR ANDɨM BIG SERVING SPOON (ORIG.: ‘CUTTING SPOON’) APIKARɨM (PL.: APIKARɨMBAS) CLOTHES, SKIRT, TROUSERS, T-SHIRT (ORIG.: ‘DRESS’, ‘GRASS SKIRT’, ‘FRONT COVER MADE OF DRIED FLYING FOX’) ASɨNG (PL.: ASɨNGGI) WASHING POWDER (ORIG.: ‘ASHES’; ‘FIREPLACE’) AYNGANG (PL.: AYNGANGGI) FUEL LINE, ELECTRICITY CORD (ORIG.: ‘ROPE’, ‘STRING’, ‘VINE’) IMBIAN (PL.: IMBIAS) 20 PG KINA BANKNOTE (ORIG.: ‘PIG’) IMBIAN KɨMBRI (PL.: IMBIAN KɨMBRINJI) INTRODUCED FISH CALLED IN TOK

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PISIN RABAMAUS ‘RUBBER-MOUTH’ (ORIG.: ‘SNOUT OF PIG’) INBRɨM (PL.: IMBRAS) PAPER, NEWSPAPER, BOOK (WHEN IN PLURAL) (ORIG.: ‘LEAF’) KAWI (PL.: ARIA) TINNED FISH, CAN OF FISH (ORIG.: ‘SMALL FISH’) KINGGI (SG.: KINGGɨNMA) COINS, MONEY (ORIG.: ‘KINGFISHER’) KWASɨPɨK (PL.: KWASɨPɨKɨNGGI) 1 PG KINA COIN (ORIG.: ‘THING WITH A HOLE’) KAYNGGAMɨNɨNG AEROPLANE (ORIG.: ‘PIECE OF BROKEN (PL.: KAYNGGAMɨNɨNGGI) CANOE’; ‘BANCH MADE FROM SIDE OF CANOE’) KɨNDɨKAY (PL.: KɨNDɨKAYNGGAR) TAIL OF PLANE OR HELICOPTER (ORIG.: ‘HEAD OR HANDLE OF PADDLE’) KAMBANɨNG (PL.: KAMBANɨNGGI) BRACELET, HAND WATCH, RING ON FINGER (ORIG.: ‘ARM-BAND MADE OF RATTAN’) KRIAPɨR WANYA (PL.: KRIAPɨR WANYI) RAZOR BLADE (ORIG.: ‘SHAVING KNIFE, PIECE OF BAMBOO USED FOR SHAVING’) KAMAN PINJING (PL. KAMAN PINJINGGI) EXHAUST PIPE, GUN (ORIG.: ‘PIECE OF BAMBOO’) KRMAIM (PL.: KRMAIMBAS) VIDEO CAMERA, MOVIE CAMERA ON TRIPOD (ORIG.: ‘FORKED HOLDER OF ROOF’; ‘LONG CARVED OBJECT’) KWAY (ONLY IN SINGULAR) SOAP, BODY OIL, HAIR OIL, CREAM (ORIG. ‘OIL FROM A TREE’) KAMBUKWA (PL.: KAMBUKWI) LETTER (ORIG.: ‘CORDYLINE LEAF’; ‘MESSAGE’) KAPɨNG (PL.: KAPɨNGGAR) PIECE OF CLOTH OR SPUNGE USED TO REMOVE WATER FROM CANOE (ORIG.: ‘SMASHED PIECE OF BANANA STICK USED AS SPUNGE TO REMOVE WATER FROM CANOE’) KUMUNGGRɨM (PL.: KUMUNGGRɨMBAS) UNDERPENTS (ORIG.: ‘PADS WORN BY or WOMEN MADE OF TENDER LEAFLETS MANDɨNGARɨNG (PL.: OF SAGO PALM’) MANDɨNGARɨNGGI)

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KRIPAN (PL.: KRIPAS, KRIPANIA) AEROPLANE, OUTBOARD MOTOR, GENERATOR; 100 PG KINA BANKNOTE (ORIG.: ‘BEETLE, BUG, LOUSE’) MASɨNɨNG (PL.: MASɨNɨNGGI) PROPELER OF AIRCRAFT (ORIG.: ‘WHEEL MADE OF COCONUT LEAVES’ – IT TURNS WHEN CHILDREN RUN WITH IT) PAMBANG (PL.: PAMBANGGAR) GUN (ORIG.: ‘BOW’) PANDɨNG (PL.: PANDɨNGGI) FORK (ORIG.: ‘LADLE MADE OF BAMBOO FOR MAKING AND STIRRING SAGO PUDDING’) PɨPMBɨNɨNG (PL.:PɨPMBɨNɨNGGI) PLASTIC STRING FOR FISHING (ORIG.: ‘FIBRES FROM AERIAL ROOTS OF WILD PANDANUS USED TO MAKE STRING’) SAS (PL.: SASɨRI) NAIL (ORIG.: ‘THORN’ - ON SAGO PALMS, FOR EXAMPLE) SAWYA (ONLY IN PLURAL) MONEY (ORIG.: ‘SHELLS’) SIKIYARɨNG (PL.: SIKIYARɨNGGI) BEADS FOR MAKING NECKLACE OR RASTA HAIR (ORIG.: ‘STRING OF SHELLS AND BEADS FOR DECORATION AROUND ONE’S NECK’, ‘NECKLACE’) SIPI (ONLY IN SINGULAR) BUISCUITS (ORIG.: ‘SAGO PANCAKE’) SɨSɨNɨNG (PL.: SɨSɨNɨNGGI) RICE (WHEN IN PLURAL) (ORIG.: ‘SEED’; ‘GLAND’; ‘HEART’)

MARASIN SɨSɨNɨNG TABLET, PILL (ORIG.: ‘MEDICINE SEED’; ‘MARASIN’ IS TOK PISIN FOR MEDICINE) SɨMɨNG (PL.: SɨMɨNGGI) PLASTIC CONTAINER (FOR WATER, or PETROL, KEROSINE), BOWL, WURANGGɨN SɨMɨNG SAUCEPEN, CUP; HAT, CAP (ORIG.: ‘COCONUT SHELL FOR COLLECTING WATER’; ‘DEEP PAN MADE OF CLAY FOR BOILING WATER’) SɨSɨKOPIKARARɨNG UNDERWEAR (ORIG.: ‘FEMALE (PL.: SɨSɨKOPIKARARɨNGGI) UNDERWEAR MADE OF NGGURI LEAVES’) SARIA (ONLY IN PLURAL) 50 PG KINA BANKNOTE (ORIG.: ‘FACE’, ‘MASK’) SAMBIANG (ONLY IN SINGULAR) GLUE (ORIG.: ‘WHITE OF AN EGG’;

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‘SNIVEL, SNOT’; ‘SPERM’; ‘SAP FROM SAGO LEAVES’; ‘SOMETHING WHITE AND STICKY’) SANDAM (PL.: SANDAMBAS) 1 PG KINA COIN; IN PLURAL: MONEY; NECKLACE (ORIG.: ‘ROUND SHELL WITH HOLE’) SANDAMBɨNMA (PL.: SANDAMBAS) 5 PG KINA BANKNOTE ; WHEN IN PLURAL: MONEY, NECKLACE (ORIG.: ‘SPIDER’) SANGGUT ANDI (ONLY IN SINGULAR) SOAP (ORIG.: ‘CLAY OF FLUTE’; ‘BEAUTIFUL EARTH/CLAY’) SINGARA (PL.: SINGARI) CUP (ORIG.: ‘COCONUT SHELL FOR DRINKING WATER’) SUNGGWINJIRɨMBAS LED LIGHT TORCH (ORIG.: ‘STAR’) (SG.: SUNGGWINJIRɨMBɨNMA) WAYNGGAR (SG.: WAYNG) MONEY IN BANKNOTES (ORIG.: ‘TYPE OF KNOT MADE BY RATTAN’) YANGGA (PL.: YANGGANGGAR) FLASH ON CAMERA (ORIG.: ‘LIGHTNING’) YANGI (PL.: YANGɨR) SAUCEPAN (ORIG.: ‘DEEP CONTAINER MADE OF CLAY FOR SAGO FLOUR’) YANɨNG (ONLY IN SINGULAR) OINTMENT (ORIG.: ‘FAT, GREASE’) YIMBUNG (PL.: YIMBUNGGAR) 10 PG KINA BANKNOTE (ORIG.: ‘SLIT- DRUM’) YUKUM (PL.: YUKUMBAS) BAG, BACKPACK (ORIG.: ‘BASKET’)

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APPENDIX 4:

DESCRIPTIONS OF HEAD AND FACE DURING DISPUTES AND CASUAL OBSERVATIONS

PART OF LOCAL EXPRESSION ENGLISH DERIVATION – LITERAL TYPE OF DESCRIPTION FACE TRANSLATION TRANSLATION EXPRESSION

‘FACE’ SARIA MAMAKIA BAD FACE MAMA- ‘BAD’ INSULT USED IN DISPUTES SARIA AND CROSS WITH CHILDREN

SARIA PAMBIAKIA SHORT FACE PAMBIA- ‘SHORT’ OBSERVATION DESCRIPTION OF PERSON

SARIA KWANGGIAKIA LONG FACE KWANGGIA- ‘LONG’ OBSERVATION DESCRIPTION OF PERSON

SARIA AKUKUSAKIA SERIOUS FACE AKUKUSA- ‘SERIOUS, INSULT, BAD A PERSON FEELS BAD FURIOUS, CROSS, DESCRIPTION WHEN TALKED ABOUT CLOUDY’ IN SUCH A WAY, USED IN DISPUTES

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SARIA KUPA KAMBɨNɨNG LARGE, HEAVY FACE KUPA- ‘BIG’, KAMBɨNɨNG OBSERVATION, A PERSON FEELS BAD ‘FIGHTING SHIELD’ (LIT. BAD WHEN TALKED ABOUT ‘FACE AS BIG AS DESCRIPTION IN SUCH A WAY, USED FIGHTING SHIELD’) IN DISPUTES

SARIA AYNGA SɨKɨN SERIOUS FACE, AYNGA ‘ON THE SIDE’, Sɨ- INSULT MAN WHO DOES NOT GREEDY FACE ‘FEEL, BECOME’ LIKE TO TALK TO PEOPLE, FACE LIKE THAT OF SNAKE, PERSON TO BE AVOIDED

WAPɨN PARA SARIA GOOD, HAPPY, WAPɨN ‘ATRACTIVE, OBSERVATION, PERSON WITH SMILING FACE INTERESTING, NICE’, PAY- GOOD ATRACTIVE SMILING ‘SLEEP’ DESCRIPTION FACE

WURUMɨNDɨ SARIA HAPPY FACE, WURUMɨNG- ‘LAUGH, OBSERVATION, PERSON WITHOUT BAD LAUGHING FACE PLAY’ GOOD FEELINGS OR DESCRIPTION THOUGHTS, PLAYFUL PERSON

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SARIA PAN KUPAYA VERY BIG FACE PAN ‘VERY’, KUPA- ‘BIG’ INSULT PERSON WITH BIG HEAD

SARIA YIPɨSɨKIA HEAVY FACE YIPɨSɨ- ‘HEAVY’ INSULT DESCRIPTION OF ANGRY PERSON WHO IS CROSS ALL THE TIME

SARIA YAPAKUPAKIA GOOD FACE YAPAKUPA- ‘GOOD’ OBSERVATION GOOD LOOKING AND GENEROUS PERSON

SARIA MAUN AWSAKIA HIGH FACE MAUN ‘UP’, AWSA- ‘PUT’ INSULT DESCRIPTION OF A SELFISH PERSON, A PERSON THAT BOASTS AND SHOWS OFF

SARIA APASɨSAKIA FACE THAT STICKS APASɨSA- ‘COME OUT AND INSULT PUSHY, ANGRY, OUT STAY’ GREEDY PERSON

‘EARS’ KWANDɨKAS MAMAKIA BAD EARS MAMA- ‘BAD’ INSULT, CHILD OR PERSON KWANDɨKAS OBSERVATION WHO DOES NOT LISTEN, DEAF PERSON

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KWANDɨKAS PARAMA DEAF AND DUMP PARAMA ‘CRAZY, MAD, INSULT, CHILD OR PERSON PERSON DEAF-AND-DUMB OBSERVATION WHO DOES NOT PERSON’ LISTEN, DEAF-AND- DUMB PERSON

KWANDɨKAS INGARISAN MAN WITH EARS WIDE INGARISA- ‘OPEN, WIDE, OBSERVATION PERSON WITH LARGE OPEN STICKING OUT’ EARS STICKING OUT

KWANDɨKAS YARAKɨSAN MAN WITH EARS YARAKɨSA- ‘GROW FAST’ INSULT DESCRIPTION OF A STICKING OUT (USED WITH MUSHROOMS PERSON IN DISPUTES THAT GROW OVER NIGHT ON A TREE TRUNK)’

KWANDɨKAS KANAR/KANMA MAN/WOMAN KAN-AR/MA ‘ MAN/WOMAN OBSERVATION, DEAF PERSON, ONE WITHOUT EARS WITHOUT SOMETHING’ INSULT WHO DOES NOT LISTEN TO TALK

KWANDɨKAS WUSɨK DIRTY EARS WUSɨK ‘DIRT’ NGANDɨK- INSULT, PERSON WHO DOES NGANDɨKIA ‘WITH, HAVE’ OBSERVATION NOT LISTEN TO TALK

KWANDɨKAS KARING-SAMɨN DIRTY EARS SAMɨN ‘EAR WAX’, KARING INSULT PERSON WHO DOES

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NGANDɨKIA ‘TYPE OF GRASS FOR NOT LISTEN TO TALK CLEANING EARS’, NGANDɨK- ‘WITH, HAVE’

KWANDɨKAS MɨNYAKIA YOUR EARS ARE LIKE KONGGRAMBANɨNGGɨNMA INSULT DESCRIPTION OF A KONGGRAMBANɨNGGI MUSHROOMS ‘MUSHROOM’, BɨNAMBAN PERSON IN DISPUTES BɨNAMBAN ‘LIKE’, MɨNYA- ‘YOURS’

‘EYES’ SAMBɨS KANAR/KANMA BLIND MAN/WOMAN KAN-AR/MA ‘MAN/WOMAN INSULT, MAN WHO DOES NOT SAMBɨS WITHOUT SOMETHING’ OBSERVATION SEE OTHERS, MAN WHO DOES NOT WATCH, BLIND MAN

SAMBɨS WURAKɨKɨN STINKING EYES WURAKɨK- ‘STINK’ INSULT, CROSS OR JOKING OBSERVATION WITH CHILDREN

SAMBɨS YAPAKUPAKIA GOOD EYES YAPAKUPA- ‘GOOD’ OBSERVATION OBSERVANT PERSON, ONE WHO SEES A PYTHON OR A POSSUM ON A TREE TOP

SAMBɨS ARANGARISAKIA SHARP EYES ARANGARISA- ‘ITCHY’ OBSERVATION VERY OBSERVANT

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PERSON, PERSON WITH SHARP EYES

SAMBɨS KAMAPIAN MAN WITH WIDE KAMAPIA- ‘MAN WITH OBSERVATION, MAN WHO IS OPEN EYES WIDE OPEN EYES’ SCOLDING OF SURPRISED TO SEE CHILDREN SOMETHING, CARELESS CHILD

SAMBɨSɨN NGGURUNGGI BIG EYEBALLS NGGURUNG ‘EYEBALL’, INSULT USED IN DISPUTES KUPANGGI KUPA- ‘BIG’ FOR GREEDY PERSON

YAKA MɨNAKNGGI EYEBALLS OF BLACK YAKA ‘BLACK POSSUM’, INSULT USED IN DISPUTES NGGURUNGGI POSSUM NGGURUNG ‘EYEBALL’, SAYING THAT ONE HAS MɨNA- ’ITS’ BIG EYES BUT DOES NOT SEE PROPERLY

SAMBɨS AWA MɨNAKIA CASSOWARY’S EYES AWA ‘CASSOWARY’, MɨNA- OBSERVATION LARGE EYES OF A ‘ITS’ CHILD

MAS MɨNAKNGGI EYEBALLS OF MAS ‘POSSUM’, INSULT, DESCRIPTION OF NGGURUNGGI POSSUM NGGURUNG ‘EYEBALL’ SCOLDING CHILD OR PERSON MɨNA- ‘ITS’ WHO DOES NOT SEE PROPERLY AND ACTS

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STUPIDLY, ‘BIG EYES’

MɨNDAUN MɨNAKNGGI EYEBALLS OF LARGE MɨNDAUN ‘TYPE OF FISH’, INSULT, DESCRIPTION OF NGGURUNGGI NATIVE FISH NGGURUNG ‘EYEBALL’, SCOLDING CHILD OR PERSON MɨNA- ‘ITS’ WHO HAS ‘BIG EYES’ BUT DOES NOT SEE PROPERLY AND ACTS STUPIDLY

IMBIAN MɨNAKNGGI EYEBALLS OF PIG IMBIAN ‘PIG’, NGGURUNG INSULT, DESCRIPTION OF NGGURUNGGI ‘EYEBALL’, MɨNA- ‘ITS’ SCOLDING CHILD OR PERSON WHO DOES NOT SEE PROPERLY AND ACTS STUPIDLY

WAKɨN MɨNAKNGGI BAD EYEBALLS OF WAKɨN ‘SNAKE’, INSULT, USED WITH CHILDREN NGGURUNGGI MAMAKNGGI SNAKE NGGURUNG ‘EYEBALL’, SCOLDING IN PLAYFUL CROSS OR MAMA- ‘BAD’ SERIOUSLY IN DISPUTES

SAMBɨS ANGGURINGAKIA OPENED EYES ANGGURINGA- ‘OPEN’ OBSERVATION WAKING UP IN THE MORNING WHEN ONE OPENS EYES

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PUSI MɨNAKNGGI EYEBALLS OF CAT PUSI ‘CAT’ (IN TOK PISIN), OBSERVATION GOOD DESCRIPTION NGGURUNGGI NGGURUNG ‘EYEBALL’, OF A CHILD MɨNA- ‘ITS’

‘LIPS’ YIPɨMBAS YAMBɨKIAN THICK LIPS YAMBɨKIA- ‘RIPE, HEAVY, INSULT MAN WITH HEAVY, YIPɨMBAS THICK, BIG’ SWOLLEN, THICK LIPS

YIPɨMBAS INGARISAKIA OPEN LIPS/MOUTH INGARISA- ‘OPENED’ INSULT LIPS THAT ARE OPENED (LIKE A BASKET) AND STICK OUT, A PERSON WHO TALKS A LOT

YIPɨMBAS WAPɨMBɨN FOLDED, ROLLED UP WAPɨ- ‘ROLL, FOLD’ INSULT STRAIGHT LINE OF WUSɨKɨN LIPS WUSɨ- ‘TURN OVER, PUT LIPS, ROLLED AS A IN’ CIGARETTE EXPRESSING ANGER

YIPɨMBAS KAMBɨNɨNGGI LARGE HEAVY LIPS KAMBɨNɨNG ‘SHIELD’ (LIT. INSULT HUGE SWOLLEN LIPS ‘LIPS-SHIELDS’) STICKING OUT

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YIPɨMBAS ARɨPIAN = ANDɨM HANGING LIPS ARɨPIA- ‘GONE DOWN, INSULT LOWER LIP HANGS ARɨPIAN MOVED DOWN ’, ANDɨM DOWN OR COVERS ‘BIRD’S NEST; COCONUT UPPER LIP (LIP IS LIKE SHELL SPOON’ COCONUT SHELL SPOON OR BIRD’S NEST)

YIPɨMBAS KAMIAMBASAN WIDE OPENED LIPS KAMIAMBASA- ‘WIDE INSULT PERSON WHO TALKS A OPEN’ LOT IRRELEVANT THINGS, PERSON WHOSE MOUTH IS WIDE OPEN

YIPɨMBAS SANɨNGIAN TIGHT LIPS SANɨNGIA- ‘TIGHTENED’ INSULT LIPS THAT GET TIGHT LIKE A ROPE, PENIS OR FISH OVER FIRE

YIPɨMBAS WARINGGAKIA LIGHT LIPS WARINGA- ‘LIGHT, NOT OBSERVATION, PERSON WHO TALKS HEAVY’ SCOLDING TOO MUCH

YIPɨMBAS MɨNAKIA PAN HEAVY LIPS MɨNA- ‘ITS’, PAN ‘VERY’, SCOLDING, PERSON NOT TALKING YIPɨSIKIA YIPɨSɨ- ‘HEAVY’, OBSERVATION MUCH BECAUSE OF ‘HEAVY’ LIPS

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‘LIPS WITH YIPRɨKɨM YAPAKUPAN GOOD FACE, GOOD YAPAKUPA- ‘GOOD’ OBSERVATION GOOD, HAPPY FACE, A NOSE, LIPS AND NOSE CHEERFUL PERSON SNOUT’ WHO DOES NOT GET YIPRɨKɨM CROSS

YIPRɨKɨM MAMAN BAD FACE, BAD LIPS MAMA- ‘BAD’ INSULT, SERIOUS, ANGRY FACE AND NOSE SCOLDING

AWSɨN YIPRɨKɨM FACE OF BANDICOOT AWS ‘BANDICOOT’ OBSERVATION SMALL NOSE, SHORT NICE FACE, NOSE STANDING UP

YIPRɨKɨM WASA PAMBIYAM SHORT FACE WASA ‘LITTLE’, INSULT, CHILD WHO IS ALL THE PAMBIYA- ‘SHORT’ SCOLDING TIME IN THE RIVER TELLING THAT HIS OR HER FACE IS LIKE FACE OF A FISH

‘MOUTH’ ANDUK WURAKɨKɨN STINKING MOUTH WURAKɨK- ‘STINK’ INSULT IN DISPUTE ANDUK DESCRIBING A PERSON WHO DOES NOT TALK MUCH

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ANDUK KANAR/KANMA A MAN/WOMAN WITH KAN-AR/MA ‘MAN/WOMAN OBSERVATION, PERSON WHO DOES NO MOUTH WITHOUT SOMETHING’ INSULT NOT TALK MUCH

ANDUK MORUM NGANDɨK SMELLY MOUTH MORUM ‘BAD SMELL’ OBSERVATION, PERSON WHO NGANDɨK ‘WITH, HAVE’ INSULT SWEARS, PERSON WITH BAD SMELL COMING FROM MOUTH

ANDUK KUPANG BIG MOUTH KUPA- ‘BIG’ INSULT LOUD PERSON, SHOUTING PERSON

ANDUK ARKAPɨKAN FULLY OPENED ARK- ‘SPLIT’, APɨ- ‘PUT INSULT, GOSSIPING PERSON, MOUTH INSIDE’ OBSERVATION PERSON WITH A POWERFUL TALK

ANDUK PAN WASASAK VERY SMALL MOUTH PAN ‘VERY’, WASA-‘ SCOLDING, CHILD WHO DOES NOT SMALL’ OBSERVATION SPEAK AND LISTEN

ANDUK MINYAK YIMBUNG MOUTH LIKE A SLIT- MINYA- ‘YOURS’, YIMBUNG OBSERVATION LOUD SCREAMING MɨNAMBAN DRUM ‘SLIT-DRUM’, MɨNAMBAN PERSON FULL OF ‘LIKE’ ANGER

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‘NOSE’ IPɨN KUPAN BIG NOSE KUPA- ‘BIG’ INSULT, PERSON WITH HUGE IPɨN SCOLDING NOSE

INGRɨNGGI KUPANGGI LARGE NOSTRILS INGRɨNG ‘NOSTRIL’, KUPA- INSULT DESCRIPTION OF BAD ‘BIG’ LOOKING PERSON

IPɨN KUPAN IMBIAN KɨMBRI BIG NOSE LIKE KUPA- ‘BIG’, IMBIAN ‘PIG’, INSULT, COMPARISON WITH PIG SNOUT OF PIG KɨMBRI ‘SNOUT, MUZZLE’ SCOLDING IN DISPUTES

WIYA MɨNAN KɨMBRI SNOUT OF DOG WIYA ‘DOG’, MɨNA- ‘ITS’, INSULT, COMPARISON WITH KɨMBRI ‘SNOUT, MUZZLE’ SCOLDING BARKING DOG IN DISPUTES

IPɨN WANANɨNG APANDAN STRAIGHT NOSE WANANɨNG ‘MIDDLE OBSERVATION DESCRIPTION OF A VERTICAL POST IN A CHILD WITH GOOD, HOUSE’, APANDA- ‘ERECT’ STRAIGHT FACE

IPɨN KWANGGIAN LONG NOSE KWANGGIA- ‘LONG’ INSULT, BAD LOOKING PERSON, SCOLDING USED OFTEN WITH CHILDREN

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IPɨN PAMBIAN SHORT NOSE PAMBIA- ‘SHORT’ INSULT, BAD LOOKING PERSON, SCOLDING USED OFTEN WHEN SCOLDING CHILDREN

IPɨN INGARISAN OPENED NOSE INGARISA- ‘OPENED’ INSULT, BAD LOOKING PERSON, SCOLDING USED OFTEN WHEN SCOLDING CHILDREN

‘HEAD’ KANAPANG KUPANG BIG HEAD KUPA- ‘BIG’ OBSERVATION, KNOWLEDGEABLE OR KANAPANG INSULT SHOW-OFF PERSON and KANAPANG WASASAK SMALL HEAD WASA- ‘SMALL’ OBSERVATION, STUPID PERSON, INSULT UNEDUCATED PERSON ‘NECK’ PɨKRɨNG KANAPANG YAMBAN HEAD WITH OPENED KAPIA- ‘CLEARED AREA, OBSERVATION BOLD PERSON, MAN KAPIAN SPACE OPENED SPACE’ WITHOUT HAIR IN THE MIDDLE OF HEAD

KANAPANG WAMBIMBAN HEAD LIKE A WAMBIMBAN WURANG INSULT, BAD DESCRIPTION OF WURANG PARASITIC PLANT ‘ORCHID-LIKE PARASITE SCOLDING OF SOMEONE’S HEAD AROUND A TREE GROWING ON TREES’ CHILDREN TRUNK

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SAUN MɨNAK PɨKRɨNG NECK AS LONG AS SAUN ‘HERON’, MɨNA- ‘HIS, SCOLDING OF PERSON WHO KWANGGIAK THE ONE OF HERON HER’ KWANGGIA- ‘LONG’ CHILDREN, WATCHES, OBSERVES, OBSERVATION STARES, GAZES

KAMBRA KANAPANG BOLD HEAD KAMBRA ‘NOTHING’ OBSERVATION BOLD MAN

‘TEETH’ SɨSɨNGGI SɨRAPIAN LOSENED TEETH SɨRAPIA- ‘LOSE’ (WHEN INSULT, DESCRIPTION OF UGLY SɨSɨNGGI TEETH FALL OUT LIKE SCOLDING FACE SEEDS IN CORN OR PANDANUS WHEN RIPE)

KUPA SɨSɨNGGI or SɨSɨNGGI BIG TEETH KUPA- ‘BIG’ OBSERVATION, DESCRIPTION OF A KUPANGGI SCOLDING FACE

SɨSɨNGGI KUPA BIG AND SHARP KUPA- ‘BIG’ OBSERVATION PERSON WITH LARGE AKWANAPMBAS TEETH SHARP TEETH LIKE THOSE OF ANIMALS, PIGS, CROCODILES

SɨSɨNGGI BLACK TEETH FROM WURUKUPɨSA- ‘BLACK, OBSERVATION, RED COLOURED TEETH

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WURUKUPɨSAKNGGI CHEWING BETEL DARK’ TOK PLAY FROM CHEWING TOO NUTS MANY BETEL NUTS

‘HAIR’ WAPɨS ARAMBRIAN LOSS OF HAIR ARAMBRIA- ‘TORN APART; OBSERVATION PERSON WHOSE HAIR WAPɨS BROKEN ON SEVERAL STICKS OUT, PERSON PARTS’ WITH PARTS WITHOUT HAIR

ISɨN WAPɨS SALTY HAIR ISɨN ‘SALT’ OBSERVATION, YOUNG MAN WITH NEW SCOLDING BEARD OR MOUSTACHE, CHILD GROWING SLOWLY BECAUSE OF HAIRY BODY

KɨMBIAN WAPɨS HAIR LIKE ALGAE KɨMBIA ‘ALGAE’ OBSERVATION SMOOTH HAIR OF A (WHITE) PERSON

WIYANMA WAPɨS LOOSING HAIR LIKE A ARAMBRIA- ‘TORN APART, INSULT PERSON LOOSING ARAMBRIANMA FEMALE DOG BREAK’, WIYANMA HAIR LIKE A DOG, BAD ‘FEMALE DOG’ HAIR

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WIYANMA WAPɨS CHANGING HAIR LIKE KAPIA ‘PLACE WITHOUT INSULT LOSS OF HAIR LIKE A WANDɨKAPIANMA A FEMALE DOG GROWTH, CLEARED DOG THAT CHANGES PLACE’, WIYANMA HAIR, BAD HAIR ‘FEMALE DOG’, WANDɨKAPIA- ‘CHANGING FEATHERS OR HAIR’

SAUNYAR WAPɨS WHITE HAIR SAUN ‘HERON’ OBSERVATION OLD PERSON WITH GREY HAIR

SAUNYAR PURUMUNGWAY OLD PERSON WITH SAUN ‘HERON', PURUM OBSERVATION BIG MAN OR WOMAN WHITE HAIR ‘TYPE OF A TREE WITH WHOSE HAIR IS GREY WHITE FRUITS’ OR WHITE

THERE ARE FEW OTHER EXPRESSIONS USING WORDS, SUCH AS, FOR EXAMPLE, ‘SKIN’, ‘BELLY’, or ‘BUM’: KAPɨS KANɨNG ‘YOUR BUM IS SMALL LIKE THE ONE OF A FROG’, USED AS INSULT OR JUST OBSERVATION. MɨNDɨR SAMɨNG MAMAK PANKUPAN ‘BIG BAD BELLY FULL OF SHIT’ USED EXCLUSIVELY AS INSULT IN DISPUTES. ARɨM SAKURSIANMA or MɨMRɨS ARɨM KARɨNGGANMA ‘WOMAN HAVING RINGWORM (TINEA OR ANY OTHER SKIN DISEASE)’, OBSERVATION.

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APPENDIX 5: SIGNS & SOUNDS

GROUP 1 ANIMALS SEEN AND HEARD DURING THE DAY OR NIGHT AND IN PEOPLE’S DREAMS

KONI ‘SMALL BLACK BIRD WITH A MARKS DAWN OF A DAY (ARIAR WI). WHEN ITS CALL IS ACCOMPANIED BY ‘SEEING’ A SPIRIT LEAVING A LONG TAIL’ DYING PERSON, THE DISEASED WILL DIE. SANGGUMBAS MING ‘BIRD FROM USUALLY CALLS AT NIGHT WHEN IT IS FULL MOON. ITS CALL FORETELLS THE COMING OF RAIN. ITS NAME FORESTED AREAS IN HIGHER IS ALSO A METAPHOR FOR A PERSON WHO STAYS AWAKE ALL NIGHT. ALTITUDES’ YAKWAN ‘ROOSTER’ WHEN CALLING IN THE EVENING SOMETHING IMPORTANT WILL HAPPEN, SOMEONE IMPORTANT WILL COME, OR SOMEONE WILL DIE. ANY BIRD WHEN A BIRD FLIES THROUGH OR UNDER A HOUSE IT MEANS THAT SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN OR THAT SOMEONE WILL COME. ANY BIRD WHEN A PERSON IS WALKING IN THE FOREST, AND A BIRD SUDDENLY SITS ON THEIR SHOULDER, KICKS THEM AND THEN SHAKINGLY FALLS DOWN AND DIES, IT MEANS THAT THEY HAVE TO RETURN TO THE VILLAGE BECAUSE SOMEONE FROM THEIR CLOSEST FAMILY WANTS TO FIGHT. MAMBINGɨNMA ‘SMALL NATIVE IF THIS FISH JUMPS INTO CANOE WHILE PADDLING AND DIES IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE WHO IS SICK IN FISH WITH LONG NOSE’ THE FAMILY WILL DIE.

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PANKAWI ‘SMALL NATIVE FISH’ WHEN THIS FISH JUMPS INTO CANOE WHILE PADDLING IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE IS COMING TO SEE ME, THAT I MAY CATCH A PIG, THAT MY FISHING NET HAS FISH, THAT SOMETHING IMPORTANT WILL HAPPEN, OR THAT SOMEONE WILL DIE. MɨKɨS ‘LIZARD’ WHEN A PERSON HUNTS A PIG, A GOOD SPIRIT CAN TAKE THE SHAPE OF A LIZARD TO SHOW THE HUNTER THAT A PIG IS NEARBY. WHEN HE FOLLOWS THE LIZARD, IT DISAPPEARS AND INSTEAD HE KILLS THE PIG. LANGɨNMA ‘MILLEPEDE’ WHEN MANY MILLEPEDES COME IN THE MOSQUITO NET WHILE I AM SLEEPING, IT MEANS THAT A CLOSE PERSON IS DYING IN MY ABSENCE. MAS MORUM ‘SMELL OF POSSUMS HAVE A VERY STRONG SMELL. WHEN WALKING AROUND ONE SMELLS IT, THEY KNOW THAT IT POSSUM’ IS SOMEWHERE NEARBY AND THAT THEY WILL HAVE A CHANCE TO KILL IT. PAMɨNGɨNMA ‘HORSEFLY’ WHEN MANY FLIES SIT ON SOMEBODY, ESPECIALLY ON MY LEGS, IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE IS ANGRY WITH THEM. MAS ‘POSSUM’ IF SOMEBODY KILLS A POSSUM EARLY ON WHEN GOING TO HUNT PIGS HE SHOULD RETURN HOME AS THE SIGN IS NOT GOOD. MANBO ‘CROCODILE’ WHEN A CROCODILE IS SPOTTED AT AN UNUSUAL PLACE IT IS A BAD SIGN. FOR EXAMPLE, RELATIVES ARE RETURNING TO THE VILLAGE AFTER LEAVING THEIR SICK IN THE HOSPITAL. A CROCODILE SUDDENLY APPEARS AT A PLACE WHERE IT IS NOT EXPECTED. IT MEANS THAT THE PERSON IN HOSPITAL WILL DIE. AMɨNG ‘ANIMALS, FOOD’ WHEN A MAN KILLS MANY ANIMALS IT MEANS THAT SOMEBODY WILL DIE. BIG ANIMAL (PIG, CASSOWARY, IF A PERSON DREAMS AT NIGHT ABOUT HOW HIS/HER SON DIED IN THE FISHING NET IT MEANS THAT CROCODILE) HE/SHE WILL DEFINITELY FIND A BIG ANIMAL IN THE NET.

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IMBO ‘BLACK ADDER’ WHEN SOMEBODY IS BITTEN BY A BLACK ADDER FOR THE FIRST TIME, ONE DOES NOT NEED TO DIE. IT IS A SIGN ABOUT ONE’S HIDDEN SIN. IF ONE DOES NOT REVEAL IT, PEOPLE SAY, THE SNAKE WILL BITE HIM/HER AGAIN AND HE/SHE WILL DIE. WAKɨN ‘SNAKE’ WHEN A SNAKE IS SEEN SWIMMING AT THE FRONT OF THE CANOE IT IS A BAD SIGN AND ONE SHOULD TURN AROUND AND PADDLE BACK TO THE VILLAGE

GROUP 2 BODY ITCHES AND OTHER RESPONSES OF THE SKIN-BODY

ASɨMBɨS ‘SNEEZING’ I WILL STRECH MY HAND AFTER SNEEZING. IF THE JOINTS CRACK, SOMEONE WHO IS FAR AWAY IS CALLING ME. APRɨKRAIN ‘IT’S GETTING ITCHY’ WHEN A PALM OF THE HAND IS ITCHY IT MEANS THAT SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN OR SOMEONE FAR AWAY IS CALLING ME. KANGGARING ‘ITCH, IRRITATING WHEN YOU DO NOT SLEEP WELL, TURNING FROM SIDE TO SIDE, IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE WILL VISIT FEELING ON SKIN’ YOU. SUNGGWAN MAIA WUSɨKAN WHEN I EXPERIENCE RINGING IN THE EARS IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE IS CALLING ME OR THAT I WILL KWANDɨKAS ‘RINGING IN EARS’ RECEIVE SOMETHING, SOME NEWS, FOR EXAMPLE. SɨMɨN ‘BLOOD-VESSEL’ (VEINS WHEN BLOOD VESSELS ARE STRONGLY PUMPING THE BLOOD, SO THAT THEY STICK OUT, IT MEANS ARE STICKING OUT) THAT SOMEONE IS CALLING ME, THAT SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN TO ME, OR THAT A BIG ANIMAL WAS CAUGHT IN MY FISHING NET.

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Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

WAPɨS MAIA KWASAMBɨN WHEN YOU FEEL GOOSEFLESH ON YOUR SKIN IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE IS FOLLOWING YOU, IN THE KAYKAN ‘GOOSEFLESH, CREEPS’ FOREST, FOR EXAMPLE (LIT. ‘HAIR HAS RISEN AND STAYS SO’)

WAMBUNG MɨN SIKIAN YOU DO NOT FEEL GOOD BECAUSE SOMEONE WHO IS FAR AWAY IS THINKING OF YOU, CALLING YOUR ‘INSIDENESS JUMPS’ NAME, WANTING YOU TO STAY AT HOME AND WAIT FOR HIM/HER.

WUSɨKɨMBRINYA ‘SMELL OF WHEN I PASS BY SOMEONE AT NIGHT AND HAVE NO TORCH, I SMELL HIS/HER WUSɨK (LIT.: ‘DIRT’) AND ONE’S SWEAT’ KNOW WHO HE/SHE IS.

SICKNESS OF ANY TYPE SICKNESS CAN BE A MESSAGE ABOUT ONE’S WRONGDOINGS WHICH WERE NOT TOLD, BUT DONE SECRETLY, OR WERE THE CONSEQUENCE OF ONE’S ANGER OR JEALOUSY.

GROUP 3 OBSERVATION OF CHANGES IN CLOSE SURROUNDINGS

PIASA ‘FOAM, BUBBLES ON THE WHEN I SEE FOAM ON THE WATER WHERE I WANTED TO PUT MY FISHING NET, I WILL NOT PADDLE WATER’ FURTHER BUT CHOOSE ANOTHER PLACE, BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE ALREADY WENT THERE. MANGɨRɨNG ‘DEW’ IF THE DEW HAS BEEN WIPED AWAY FROM THE LEAVES IN THE MORNING, ONE KNOWS THAT SOMEONE ELSE HAS ALREADY WALKED HERE.

YAMUNGGWAS KAMBANG YAMUNGGWAS YARMASɨNAR YAN AWSAR ‘A MAN (NOT A SPIRIT) HAS PUT A FOOTPRINT’. WHEN I GO ‘FOOTPRINT’ HUNTING OR LOOKING FOR GRUBS, I DO NOT CHOOSE THE PATH WHERE I SEE THE FOOTPRINTS

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BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE ALREADY WENT THERE. ONE CAN RECOGNIZE THE FOOTPRINT ON THE CLAN’S GARDEN BY THE BIG TOE (LIT.: ‘FLATTENED PLACE OF FOOT’).

AKRAW ‘FISHING HOOK’ AKRAW YAMBU PRIKɨSAR MAUN ‘FISHING HOOK IS PUT UP ON THE BRANCH OF A TREE’. SEEING THIS ONE SHOULD NOT WALK OR PADDLE AROUND BUT STAY IN THE VILLAGE. SOMEONE WILL DIE OR A FIGHT WILL SOON ESCALATE. KONGGON KAPUKɨK ‘CROSSED WHEN SEEING A CROSS ON A PATH, ONE SHOULD TURN BACK AS SOMETHING BAD CAN HAPPEN TO BRANCHES ON THE ROAD’ HIM/HER. MAMɨNɨNG ‘MARK, SIGN; SIGN MADE WITH KNOTTED CORDYLINE LEAF EITHER CARRIES A CERTAIN MESSAGE OR MARKS THE INVITATION, MESSAGE’ DAYS BEFORE A MEETING. SAPɨN ANDI ‘WHITE CLAY’ WHEN ONE SEES THIS SIGN ONE KNOWS THAT SOMEONE HAS DIED. AWIAR ANDI ‘RED OCHRE’ (LIT.: WHEN MAN’S FACE IS PAINTED RED ON ONE SIDE AND BLACK ON ANOTHER IT MEANS THAT THE MAN IS ‘FIRE’S CLAY’); ANDAM ANGRY AND GOES TO FIGHT. ‘CHARCOAL’ KAPUK NGɨ APASɨR ‘CRACKING IF A CRACKING NOISE OF BAMBOO IS HEARD AT NIGHT IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE WILL DIE. ANY OTHER NOISE’ CRACKING SOUND DURING THE DAY OR NIGHT FORETELLS TROUBLE, FIGHT, DEATH, OR THAT A BIG ANIMAL WAS CAUGHT IN A TRAP. WURANG ‘COCONUT’; NOISE OF IF THE SOUND OF OPENING OF A COCONUT IS HEARD AFTER DINNER, OTHERS KNOW THAT ONE DID NOT OPENING A COCONUT DURING HAVE PROPER FOOD (SAGO PUDDING OR PANCAKE WITH FISH OR MEAT), THAT ONE IS HUNGRY. WHEN THE NIGHT PEOPLE WANT TO EAT COCONUT MEAT AFTER DINNER THEY TRY TO OPEN IT IN SILENCE.

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KANDAMAK WUNDUMBUNAR WHEN DAY AFTER DAY THE FISH WHICH HAVE BEEN SMOKED BY THE WOMEN IN THE HOUSE ARE ‘NEW SPIRIT OF A DEAD MAN’ MISSING AND THE CULPRIT HAS NOT BEEN FOUND IT MEANS THAT SOMEONE WILL DIE AND THAT THE PERSON’S SPIRIT IS ALREADY WANDERING AROUND.

THE ABOVE LISTED SIGNS AND SOUNDS ARE NOT EXHAUSTIVE BUT RATHER SHOW THE INTRICACIES OF PEOPLE’S PERCEPTION WITHIN THEIR ENVIRONMENT. THERE ARE ALSO MANY OTHER GENERAL ISSUES RELATED TO SIGNS AND SOUNDS, SUCH AS: - RECOGNITION OF SOMEONE WALKING AND PADDLING: WHEN THE FACE IS NOT SEEN AND THE PERSON IS NOT RECOGNIZED, ONE GETS VERY CAUTIOUS. - RECOGNITION OF VOICES IN THE FOREST: WHEN THE VOICE IS NOT KNOWN TO WHOM IT BELONGS, A PERSON WILL NOT GET NEARBY. - WHEN ONE CUTS A SAGO PALM IN THE FOREST AND DOES NOT REMOVE THE PITH: A HEAVY STORM WITH RAIN AND WIND WILL SOON COME. - IF ONE KICKS ONE’S FEET MANY TIMES WHILE WALKING IN THE FOREST ONE NEEDS TO TURN BACK AS SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN IN THE VILLAGE. - I CARRY A CLUSTER OF BETEL NUTS TO SETTLE A DISPUTE AND ONE FALLS DOWN: IT MEANS THAT SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN OR SOMEBODY WILL DIE. - DURING THE NIGHT WHEN ONE SITS AND SOMETHING, A BETEL NUT FOR EXAMPLE, HITS HIM/HER WITHOUT SEEING WHO THREW IT: THE PERSON KNOWS THAT HE/SHE WRONGED SOMEBODY AND THE PROBLEM SHOULD BE SETTLED, OTHERWISE HIS/HER CHILD CAN DIE [PAINJUANGɨN IMBɨNGGA KURAR ‘THEY HIT ME WITH THE HUSK OF A CHEWED BETEL NUT’]. - PROHIBITION ON FOOD WHEN A WOMAN IS PREGNANT: IF PROHIBITED FOOD IS EATEN THE CHILD WILL LOOK OR BEHAVE LIKE THE PROHIBITED FOOD. THE CHILD WILL GET CERTAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EATEN ANIMAL OR PLANT.

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APPENDIX 6: MAMBɨR SIGNS

Plates 25-26: Mambɨr of two Crocodile clans called mambingong © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Appendix 6 325 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Plate 27: Mambɨr of the Bird of Paradise clan © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Appendix 6 326 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Plate 28: Two types of mambɨr of the Cassowary clan © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Plate 29: Mambɨr of the Cassowary clan with additional sign of a pig being killed © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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Plate 30: Bananas with mambɨr for someone from the Cassowary clan © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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Plate 31: Mambɨr of two Eagle clans © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Plate 32: Mambɨr of two Pig clans © Daniela Vávrová 2011

Appendix 6 329 Daniela Vávrová, PhD student 12434022 James Cook University, The Cairns Institute, School of Arts and Social Sciences

Plates 33-34: Mambɨr of the Wallaby clan with additional clay ball marking that somebody from this clan has died © Daniela Vávrová 2011

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